Is Search Wasting Your Money?

If you're paying for specific search terms in order to gain higher placement in search engine results— well, an article in a recent issue of Internet Marketing Report says that you may be spending that money for no good reason.

A report by Atlas Solutions reviewed 30 different paid search campaigns, and found that nearly half the clicks came from people who had already visited the advertiser's website. What that would indicate is that a large number of people use search engines like a glorified "directory assistance," to search by company name or product brand.

Arguably, then (at least according to this study) half the money spent on search terms was wasted! After all, half the people who "found" the site on Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft (the three search engines targeted in the study) already knew about the site and had been there before.

So, before you go out and spend a bunch of money on keywords, you may want to do more research into how people are actually ending up on your site. It may be that you can drastically reduce your search advertising expenditure without negatively impacting your traffic.

TIP: Rather than paying for search, spend time figuring out 10 "keywords" to include in your website headers, body copy, captions, etc. But don't pack those keywords into your copy (that's called "keyword stuffing") because search engines reject that strategy. Instead, try to make keywords somewhere between 2-9% of your total copy.