Searching for Classified Ad Results

To advertise your business products or services on the Web, you have some new help. Newspapers can now not only place your classified ad on their Web site and in their print product but can also help you optimize your search engine marketing as well.
The Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News, for example, have collaborated with SEM vendor WebVisible to help advertisers with search engine optimization. The Star Tribune in Minneapolis and The Miami Herald in Fla. have now followed suit, as has the Houston Chronicle in Texas.
What’s unusual about this search engine marketing and optimization is that your local newspaper is now helping you deliver your advertising message by way of its competitors, acting as your media buyer and then taking its cut on the sale.
What makes the newspaper SEO buy a sensible advertising package for many auto, real estate, Internet recruiting, merchandise and service directory advertisers is that the small budget firms, the SME’s of this world, can now enter the realm of search engine optimization without a hefty upfront fee. Many search engine marketing firms consistently looking to fill SEO jobs shut out the small businesses by requiring investments of $2,500 or even $5,000 a month, and a hefty 15 percent fee.

WebVisible has designed a software program called Geneva that gives traffic guarantees to publisher clients and their advertisers. Geneva manages the keyword buys for more than 30 of the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Ask.
You simply call your advertising sales rep at the paper, and schedule your ad in print and on its Web site. If you want to use search engines as well, you tell your rep how many leads you want. You might say, for example, that you want 200 clicks each month. The guarantee from the paper, then, becomes a total of 2400 clicks for the year for your search engine ad. The newspaper tells WebVisible, and its Geneva program takes care of the rest.
The editors study your Web site and pick out keywords that represent your company. The software then buys those keywords across the search engines at various prices. Geneva constantly monitors search engine optimization results, varying the buy as necessary, to keep your responses in line with your requested traffic. What could be easier, especially for an entrepreneur who is an SEO novice?
The way it works: the system knows you want 200 clicks by month end. If it sees that 18 days into the month you already have 170 clicks it knows your optimization must be slowed down and it bids down. Or, let’s say you’re selling skis and it’s not snowing, and you’re not getting the clicks you need. Geneva might then bid higher so that the fewer people that are buying skis are seeing your ad first.
Perhaps the greatest benefit of this WebVisible / publisher collaboration for your small business is that you can still budget your search engine optimization cost no matter what the ups and downs of the market. That’s because you pay a flat fee to the publisher. WebVisible takes all the risk.
The bottom line is this: whether one puts in the grueling amount of work needed to appear among the search engine elite, purchases assisting software, or hires a professional, any company that wants to be successful on the internet needs to be easy to find. One’s products might be the best there are out there, but if consumers can’t find it, there’s no way they’re going to be able to purchase it. No consumers mean no profits. And no profit means they won’t be in business very long.