Does your marketing portfolio include Search Engine Marketing? If not, you are leaving a lot of money on the table. Your competitors are probably laughing on their way to the bank.

Many years ago, it was perfectly fine for companies to focus only on conventional marketing. Some examples of conventional marketing includes trade shows, email marketing, yellow pages, direct mail, and media advertising. In the current unstable economic climate, these traditional marketing methods are becoming less effective. As a result, most companies decided to take the wait and see approach. They are lowering the budget spent on these campaigns. In fact, some companies have even stopped marketing altogether.

Unfortunately, this is not a wise move. You are missing out on many great opportunities and your competitors are picking up the pieces that you have left on the table. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) when done correctly can put you way ahead of your competitors even during a period of recession. Just take a look at the increase of online purchases over the years. It is an opportunity you don’t want to miss out.

Nowadays, consumers are more willing to buy things online due to the improvement in online security. Given the ease of online shopping and the convenience of buying things with just a few clicks of the mouse button, it is a no brainer for consumers to shop on the Internet. Statistics show that more and more people are relying on the search engines to research and purchase products online.

The key to success with SEM is to have someone who knows how to manage and run a campaign based on the size of your industry. Good online visibility is a must if you want to attract more visitors to your website. Obviously, your website needs to be functional and easy to use if you want to sell products or services online.

In any advertising campaign, it is important to track your ROI. An SEM campaign is no exception. The good thing is that you can get a very good ROI with a successful SEM campaign. You can expect a 10:1 or as much as a 60:1 ROI. With a 10:1 return of investment, you can spend $1000 on your advertising campaign and expect to receive back $10,000 in additional sales.

Unfortunately, most websites on the Internet are not designed to convert traffic into sales. Most websites look like online brochures. These websites are boring and doesn’t fuel your visitors’ desire to buy from you. They don’t have the information that your visitors are looking for in order to make an informed purchase. Nowadays, there are millions of websites on the Internet. One way to have your website stand out from the crowd, is to hire an SEO expert.

When it comes to Search Engine Marketing, there are two main options. The first option is search engine optimization (SEO). The second option is Pay Per Click (PPC). You can choose one over the other or you can go for both options. It all depends on your budget and how you want to target your potential customers.

Usually, SEO will deliver better results and is longer lasting. However, it takes more effort and you may not see any noticeable results initially. It can take anywhere from 3 to 6 months for your website to get ranked, depending on the competition level of the keywords you are using. Many companies are unwilling to invest in an SEO campaign because of the time taken to see results. However, companies that are willing to pursue SEO will be able to get free traffic from the search engines for a long time thereafter.

If done properly, SEO can give you the biggest ROI. Compared to Pay Per Click, Search Engine Optimization can often bring you five to seven times more targeted visitors to your site and the conversion rate for SEO traffic is usually much higher compared to PPC.

It is definitely worthwhile to include either PPC or SEO as part of your marketing campaign. After all, the traditional marketing methods are losing their effectiveness as time goes by and without SEM, you may find it harder and harder to attract new customers to your business.

Here are some interesting results from the monitoring by Backblaze of the reliability of the almost 35,000 hard drives which are used to store over 100 petabytes of data on behalf of their clients:

The way that people interact with websites has changed as more and more people go directly to the page they want to see. This means that your Home page is no longer used as often as it once was. This is something now to be considered when looking at web design.

A research website found that in 2003, 39% of their traffic went to their Home page. However, the same website saw only 19% of their traffic going to their Home page in 2009. A technology website found in one month in 2008 that 22,000 of the 70,000 page views they received went to their Home page. However, the same website saw only 2,500 views of their Home page out of 120,000 in the same month in 2010.

In 2008 a different technology website had around 10% of their traffic landing on their Home page. This decreased to only 5% by 2010. One of the biggest websites on the internet has stated that around 25% of its visitors in 2005 went to the Home page, but this decreased to 10% in 2010.

The internet is not something that people generally browse without any idea of what they are doing. Few people will ever land on Google and wonder what they are going to be looking for. As people become used to the internet what they do online becomes much more specific and focussed.

In the past, people were happy to land on a Home page and then navigate the rest of the website from there. However, this is no longer the case with more and more people using detailed searches and external links that lead them to the page that they need.

There are a lot of webmasters and marketers who assume that the Home page they have is the billboard for the website. These people often become obsessed with getting this one page correct and spend a lot of time on the design. This is actually one of the reasons why many people no longer use the Home page as the visitor does not see it as useful.

Research has found that people generally do not buy products from adverts that they see on the Home page of a website. This is why many websites look at dual-marketing strategies where they use direct and indirect marketing.

It is important that marketers and webmasters let go of the old idea of controlling what the visitor sees and does. This is something that does not work very well on the internet because the World Wide Web offers the customer the control they want. When people use online searches they are looking at directed activity as they have a destination in mind.

As consumers are looking for a specific destination you need to design a webpage that works with this. People want to find the shortest way possible to the destination in mind. If you have this to offer then the consumers are going to work with you.

Consumers do not want to go to a Home page because this is simply seen as a page full of links to where they actually want to be. While it is possible to make your Home page work for you this is something that many website owners are negating with useless graphics and messages.

When you look at web design you have to consider what your Home page is going to offer your customers. If you are looking at old-fashioned marketing then you are not going to get the results that you want.