Search Engine Marketing 101

According to statistics released by a global marketing firm, approximately 1.2 billion people worldwide, which is about 19 percent of the world’s population, are online. Domestically, about 70 percent of North America had access to the Internet in 2007. Based on those statistics there is one obvious conclusion: if you are not promoting your business online, you may not be reaching all your potential customers.

Most bail bond professionals specialize in the justice system, not online marketing. However, with the proliferation of the web as a marketing channel, every small business owner should know the basics of promoting their company online. For bail bond professionals the message is clear: you need to make sure that potential customers can easily find you when looking for bail bond services and the most effective way to achieve that is through a concept called Search Engine Marketing (SEM).

What is SEM?

SEM is a marketing plan to ensure that your company has a presence in the search engines under relevant searches. To understand this, imagine a potential client needs a bail agent. This person knows nothing about your company and nothing about bail bonds. How would this potential customer find more information? Chances are good that he or she would go online and type in keywords such as "bail bond agents" or "maricopa county bail bonds" into a search engine like Google to find a local bail agent. In turn, the search engine will generate a ranked list of websites that it deems most important to the search terms.

As a bail bond agent, you want to make sure your company appears near the top of that list. Studies show that nearly 50 percent of searchers will click on the first or second result, while 75 percent of searchers never go beyond the first page. This is especially true of your clientele. Worried and pressed for time, your potential client will click on the first few links that appear and choose the first bail bond professionals who seem like a good match. This means that if you do not have an SEM strategy and your site does not appear on the first page of a Google, Yahoo! or MSN search, your services will not even be an option for this customer. Practicing baseline SEM will help drive targeted customers to your business.

Practicing SEM

The most important component of SEM is having a presence on the Internet -- either with a company website or as an advertiser on sites such as AboutBail.com. There is a common misconception that as a small business owner without a website you don't have to worry about SEM. Nothing could be further from the truth. SEM is an essential component for small businesses with a website and critical for those without.

Recent Bail Reports have addressed both types of bail professionals. In 6 Reasons Bail Professionals Need to Market on the Web we provide the top reasons why you NEED to use the internet as a profitable marketing tool. In Website Do's and Don'ts for Bail Professionals we provide a strong set of guidelines for your website.

You can either do your own SEM or hire a company to do it for you. This article on search engine marketing is the first in a series that will give you tips to do it yourself.

While you want to raise your ranking in the search engines as quickly as possible, beware of companies with promises that are too good to be true. "We often see companies advertising promises of instant rankings of one or two in search results," said Terrence Joyce, AboutBail.com's Brand Manager. "That's just not going to happen immediately. SEM is not easy and is always changing. You need to invest time and effort into obtaining a high ranking."

While there are quick ways to get your company showing on page #1, it's still important to have an "organic" strategy to your online marketing. A future article will cover the topic of Paid vs. Organic results. Other topics in this series will cover designing for SEO and link building. Being linked to sites such as AboutBail.com, can increase your search engine rankings as this shows search engines that others want to link to your site -- making it more important.

What do you want to know about online or search engine marketing?

If there are other topics you are interested in learning about related to search engine marketing, contact us at info@aboutbail.com and we will do our best to answer these questions throughout this series.