By Cristina Andrei
It is already yesterday’s news that a SE (search engine) unfriendly website is no website at all. No matter how exquisite the design, if search engines can’t easily find a website and rank it high in their SERP listings, the target visitors won’t like it. Because they won’t even be able to find it.
This is why SEM (search engine marketing) and SEO (search engine optimization) are such efficient online promotion practices. They generate the sought-after clicks and bring the online business one step closer to its customer. Pay-per-click and paid inclusion tactics, in addition to the must-have SEO strategies, are the means of getting search engines (and Google in particular) to put a business website right under the eyes of its targeted audience.
However, today’s news is that not even Google can guarantee that those clicks translate into actual customers. Therefore the search engine giant is coming up with new strategies to make clicks more efficient and boost client sales through its paid placements. Working hard to improve the “quality” of clicks, by minimizing the number of clicks that don’t actually generate sales, Google is hoping that advertisers may be willing to pay more for each click and get more sales in return.
This new policy is already noticeable in the way paid placements are now organized on SERP listings, as their clickable area is being reduced. The goal is to drastically minimize accidental clicks by people not actually interested in the ad and improve the advertiser’s return on investment. This would make the advertiser confident enough so as to bid more for the same old keyword - with new, improved quality of clicks.
In Google’s opinion, the good news is that the price per click on most keywords has steadily increased as it managed to improve the quality of those clicks. These continuous efforts to guarantee a good ROI for its advertisers also ensure that online surfers obtain the most relevant results when actually trying to buy something on the web. It’s a Google-win situation.
