A Brief Tutorial on Internet Marketing for Small Businesses

Internet marketing for small businesses is something of a necessity in the modern world. As competition from larger companies crowd the online scene and top the search engine results, smaller companies can find it hard to keep up. But most advice columns and marketing articles throw around abbreviations and terms as though the world was well versed in their meaning. Since not everyone has a degree in online search engine marketing, we thought we would offer a brief overview of a few of the more common yet difficult terms.

“PPC” stands for “pay per click”. At its most basic level, an advertiser places an ad on a website with the promise to pay the owner of that website a certain amount for every person who clicks on that ad. The website can be an informational site related to the product, whereby the advertiser hopes to capitalize on the interest of anyone already on the website, or the website can be the results page of a search engine. The latter, however, has become a fairly competitive place in the past decade, and more and more small businesses are foregoing Ppc services, finding it harder and harder to match ad budgets with the bigger companies.

“CTR” stands for “click through rate”, and is a component of PPC marketing, though applicable to other fields as well. It is a function of how many times an ad is clicked by a visitor, divided by how many times the ad is actually viewed, expressed as a percentage. For example, an ad that was viewed by 100 people but only clicked on by 5 would have a CTR of 5 percent . The CTR of any given ad is a quantifiable measurement of its initial effectiveness.

“SEO” has become a leading source of Internet marketing for small businesses everywhere. “Search engine optimization” is a collection of marketing techniques working together to organically (or naturally) raise the search result ranking of a given website. Seo companies employ methods such as keyword research, regularly updated relevant content (including articles and blog posts) that appeals to readers, streamlined web design ideas, accumulation of natural backlinks, and social media distribution… all to boost the ranking of a website when the relevant keywords are searched by users.

It always helps to know what you are talking about when talking about something so important as your marketing. Whatever your ultimate goals, make sure you find a provider who will take the time to fully explain every detail to you, who will involve you in the planning and implementation phases as much as you want, and who can tailor their strategies for Internet marketing for small business needs. Get more here.