Should You Pay for Search Engine Listings?

Q: I put up a website to promote my jewelry business last year, but I'm not getting much traffic or making many sales. Do you think I should I pay to get listed on the search engines?

A: While billions of dollars in business are transacted on the web every day, very little of it is going to come your way unless online shoppers can find you in the search engines. Whether you should pay to be No. 1 on Google is another story.

Although the cost of sponsoring keywords such as "jewelry," "rings" or "bracelets" may seem low (a few dollars every time your site pops up in the search engines and a shopper clicks through to your pages), few of these shoppers will buy your products or services. Even if they do, they probably won't purchase big-ticket items. As a result, you may end up laying out more marketing dollars to drive traffic to your site than you'll ever recoup by selling the jewelry that's cost you so much time and money to make.

Michael Weinstein helps his clients sell their products and services on the web. He's the founder and CEO of Primary Systems, an internet marketing firm in South Salem, N.Y. He takes this view: "If your online CPC [cost-per-click] ad costs an average of $1 per click and you get 20 clicks per day, your ad costs will be $600 every 30 days. Since the average online click-to-sale conversion rate is about 2 percent, you can expect that, for every 600 clicks, 12 clicks will convert to a sale, which means that if your profits from 12 sales exceed $600, your CPC campaign will be profitable."

The key is selecting targeted keywords and ad copy that will drive qualified buyers to your site. But what if you're not an online marketing guru like Weinstein and don't know the first thing about buying keywords or running an online marketing campaign? The good news, Weinstein says, is that many search-engine marketing companies are now offering CPC services on a cost-per-action (CPA) basis, where you pay only if the campaign succeeds in ringing up sales.

And don't forget the importance of search engine optimization (SEO), Weinstein says. By working with your copywriter and web designer, you can boost your site's rankings in the unpaid (organic) search listings by:

• Creating web pages full of relevant and keyword-dense content
• Starting your own blog
• Participating in online discussions
• Asking other sites to link back to you

Best of all, SEO is free.