The goal of search engine marketing is to improve the quantity and quality of your website traffic by achieving higher search engine rankings and greater online visibility. To do this, search marketers employ a variety of strategies - search engine optimization (SEO), paid advertising, link building and web analytics. At Rout, we use all of these methods.

Components of Search Engine Marketing

Search Engine Optimization
The primary objective of a search engine optimization (SEO) campaign is to achieve higher natural (or unpaid) search engine rankings for relevant keywords. Ranking well in organic search results can direct more traffic to your site than any other method. However, SEO takes time, and is considered a long-term marketing strategy.

If you invest in an SEO campaign, Rout will first perform extensive keyword research to determine which phrases will provide the best quality traffic for your investment. From there, we will work with you to revamp your website content, meta tags, headers and footers. We may recommend creating new pages. We may also suggest modifying your site's internal link structure. These methods will gradually influence search engines to rank your site well for certain keyword phrases relevant to your online business.

Pay Per Click
SEO strategies can take time and should be maintained throughout the lifecycle of your website. Pay per click (PPC) advertising is a way for you to quickly gain visibility and increase brand awareness while you ramp up your SEO efforts. It can help you receive exposure for many keywords even if you have not yet achieved high search engine rankings.

Our PPC campaigns will increase your traffic for targeted keywords through effectively written text ads. We will consult with you and carefully choose targeted keyword phrases to ensure that you the traffic you purchase is of the highest quality. We manage PPC campaigns on several platforms, including Google Adwords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and MSN AdCenter.

Link Building
Essentially, link building helps boost your site popularity and establish your site as an authority for certain keywords. The more quality inbound links to your site, the better search engines will rank you. One link building strategy is to submit your site for inclusion in general directories, both free and paid. You can also increase your visibility through niche and local directory submissions. Link building is best implemented gradually over time to ensure that your site steadily gains online visibility.

Analytics
Website analytics will help you understand your current visitor traffic and behavior and give you a baseline to measure the success of a marketing campaign. It will show you how many visitors you have, how they are finding you, what pages are most popular within your site, and what pages are ineffective. With this data, we can evaluate your current site performance and identify areas that need work. Rout uses Google Analytics, a robust system that allows you to view your site metrics at any time by logging into your analytics account.