Videos are the most powerful marketing tool to help you engage with local prospects and get them rushing to your shop or store.

Video has the power to engage the audience and help you better connect with them.  As you know, people are visual and emotional creatures.

By using videos, you will definitely convert more visitors into foot traffic to your local business.

What Kind of Videos Should You Produce

If you don’t have ideas on what types of videos to produce, here are some suggestions:

• Create a welcome Video to greet your web visitors and give them a virtual tour of your office, facility, or shop. You can post the welcome video right on your home page.
• Use video to tell an engaging story of y of how you get started in your business and what you are passionate about.
• Capture Testimonials of happy clients.
• Educational “how to” videos to teach and share your knowledge and experiences.
• Humorous and viral videos that promotes your business, products, or services.

How to Put Video On Your Website

The easiest way to put a video on your website is to upload it to Youtube first. And then you can embed the Youtube video on your website. Check out the help section on Youtube to learn how you can easily upload your videos to Youtube.

Hosting your videos on Youtube is free, and the quality is good enough for most uses.

To display the Youtube video on your website, you’d have to get the Javascript code and embed that code into your website.

Here are the steps:

1. Click on the “share” button and the click on the “Embed” button and copy the code.
2. Insert this code into your website. You also have the option of customizing the width and height.

How to Produce a Video

Nowadays, you have lots of tools to produce a video. The cheapest methods are to use your digital camera or mobile phone. If you want better quality video and sound, then I suggest you get a Kodak pocket video camera. Below are some popular models with high ratings on Amazon.

If you want to add special effects and edit your video, you can use a video editing program. You can use a free one such as Imovie (for Mac) or Window Moviemaker. However, if you want to produce high quality and more professional videos, you should use a professional video editing software such as Adobe Premiere Elements (Retail at $79).

If you don’t want to mess around with camera and software, then another option to use is Animoto. Animoto allows you to easily create amazing videos from your photos, video clips and music. They have a rich library of music for you to use.

Within 5-10 minutes, you could create a compelling slideshow video with music and nifty special effects.

Below is an example of a video made using Animoto.

Email marketing is powerful marketing tool. Email marketing allows you to stay in touch with your customers by regularly sending them news, specials or promotions, or content. It helps to build relationship with your customers and help drive repeat visits to your business.

You should try to collect customers’ and prospects’ email addresses at every opportunity and touch points (on your your website or in your shop/store).

An email costs you almost nothing. By using an “autoresponder” service, you can send an email to your list of prospects and customers automatically.

How to Motivate Your Prospects And Clients to Sign Up

To get people to sign up, you’d need to give them incentives such as offering them coupons, discounts, or specials.

Just mention these incentives and encourage your prospects and customers to give you their emails on your website, at the cashier checkout, and other touch points.

For example, if you have a restaurant, you can instruct your waiter/waitress to ask for the customer’s email in exchange for a free dessert coupon on their next visit. You should also mention what they expect to receive in future emails, such as more special offers, educational content, or product updates.

This is called “permission” email marketing, which means that you only e-mail people that give you permission to e-mail them. It’s important that you never send mass, unsolicited emails to people. Doing so is ineffective and may lead to legal troubles for your business.

On your website, you can use an “auto responder” service like Aweber to create a sign up form. Aweber will give you a JavaScript code that you can insert on your website to get the Opt-in form.

Email Marketing Best Practices

• You need to make your privacy policy very clear. You must communicate to your prospects and customers that you will respect their privacy and you will never sell or give away their email addresses to any third parties. As you know, everyone hates to be spammed!
• Craft a clear and compelling subject line – It’s a fact that each one of us gets bombarded with all kinds of emails every day. To stand out, make sure you have a clear and compelling subject line. You can use this formula for an email subject line, “topic : benefits or values from the topic”.
• At the beginning of your email relationship, focus on providing a lot of offers and values. Reward them early for providing their emails.
• Segment your customers and send customized marketing messages to each target group. You may segment your customers based on behavior  or demographics information. For example, you could create a segment for your most loyal customers and only send special offers to that group.

Why Use Email Marketing Software?

Email marketing softwares allow you to easily create and send bulk emails with their suite of templates and designs.

Additionally, most email marketing software include the following features and options:

• Reporting, analytics and tracking abilities.
• Professionally designed templates.
• WYSIWYG editor
• Autoresponder service – An autoresponder automatically send a series of emails upon a certain action by a user (i.e. user sign up for a newsletter on the website).
• Ability to manage lists.
• Ability to import contact list from Excel.
• Ability to create different types of forms to embed in a website using javascript codes.

The Best Email Software for Small Business

Here are some good email software/services to use for your small business. These email solutions have the best delivery rate and have powerful features.

• Aweber
• Vertical Response
• Constant Contact

Just like a gourmet dish is cooked up using the blend of the best ingredients, your local business website should have certain pages and features to make it successful.

1) A Home Page that Makes Visitors Want to Stay

The home page gets the most visits. As such, making a strong first impression is very important. If you fail to capture visitors’ attention within the first few seconds, the visitors will bounce and might never come back again.

Within the top half of the home page, you must clearly communicate what services your business provide, who your target audience is, what problems you solve, what are the benefits of your services, and why they should do business with you.

You can convey the above important messages by using a combination of a strong headline, the copy on the paage, and by incorporatin relevant photos and videos.

2) Tell Your Story in the About Us Page

The “About Us” page is an important page, yet many businesses don’t put enough efforts in writing a compelling and engaging “About Us” Page.

On this page, you get an opportunity to build trust and connections with your visitors by telling your story.

First, talk about the mission of your business. Let the visitors know why you started your business and how you can help your customers. Succinctly let your visitors know what make you special, why they should do business with you and why they should trust you.

Next, talk about the history of your business, how long you have been in business, and provide some background about yourself as well as your staff.

You should also talk about your credentials and include testimonials, endorsements, awards, or mention of your business or yourself in the news.

Lastly, be sure to show photos and/or videos of yourself, your storefront, as well as your staff. Photos help make your appear more personable and likeable!

3) Service Page(s)

If you provide multiple services, you might need a separate service pages to provide more details about each service. Clearly describe each service benefits your customers, how it can solve their problems and pains, and how it make their lives better.

4) Contact Us Page

The Contact Us page should include a map of the location of your business, directions to your business as well a form for customers to fill out if they need to contact you or ask you for more information. If you use Google Maps, Google provides you with a code that you can embed on your website so that the Google map of your business location can be published on your website.

5) Stories/Testimonials Page to Build Credibility

Testimonials are important for establishing your credibility and instilling confidence in your prospects’ mind. By including photos of the people giving the testimonials could add more power to your credibility.

6) Show Off Your Works in the Gallery Page

The Gallery page is recommended for business such as photography or general contractor. Here, you can show off photos of your past projects. You can also show the “before and after” photos of your clients/projects.

7) You Need “Call To Actions”!

Your “Call to Actions” could be calling you for more information or to make an appointment, filling out a “contact us” form, or signing up to your newsletter. You should use prominent colored buttons for your “Call to Actions” and place them in visible places like on the side bar area and in the content area.

In addition to making sure your website contain the above elements, your website should follow the guidelines below to ensure the visitors have the best experience and to ensure the search engines understand what your website is about.

• Use relevant and meaningful names for each webpages. Don’t call it www.yourdomain.com/page1.html or www.yourdomain.com/page2.html. If you have a page about hair coloring, then name your page something like www.yourdomain.com/seattle-hair-coloring.html.

• Incorporate videos – Videos are great for engaging your visitors. A welcome video on the home page is great to have. Nowadays, it’s so easy to create a video. You can create a video with a Flip Cam or even your phone camera. Alternatively, you can do a slideshow video with music and it’s just as good. Animo provides an awesome platform for you to easily create stunning videos by combining your images with music and cool special effects. Below is an example of a video produced using the Animoto engine.
  Check out Animoto Now!

If you follow the above guidelines, you will have a professional, engaging, and high impact website. Once you have built your website, the next step is to drive visitors to your website. This is most important as it is no use to have an attractive website without visitors. One of the best ways to attract visitors to your local business website is to do SEO for your local business website.

In today’s Internet age, having a website for your local business is a must! If you don’t already have a website, get one now. It’s no longer an option, but a necessity for your business’ survival!

As you know, everyone uses the Internet nowadays to search for dentists, plumbers, chiropractors, hair salons, and any other local businesses. If you want to attract new customers and grow your business, it’s absolutely necessary for you to build your presence on the Internet!

Having a website is an important business strategy as it helps potential clients find you and learn more about your services and offerings.

Design and Create Your Business Website Yourself!

Nowadays, designing and creating a website doesn’t require geeky skills like in the old days. You don’t need to know HTML, CSS, or Javascripts either. With a premium wordpress template, you can easily design and create your own website within minutes.

Introducing the SmallBiz Theme

The SmallBiz Theme WordPress theme is a WordPress theme that is specifically built for small and local businesses. You can quickly create a professional website for your business in minutes with this powerful theme.

Here are the reasons why the Smallbiz Theme is perfect for building local business websites:

• Easy to set up and change – If you can use Microsoft Word, you can create your own professional looking site for your business in minutes with the Smallbiz WordPress Theme. You don’t need to use or know anything about HTML, Javascript or CSS coding at all.
• Professional designs and colors – You can choose from seven different layouts and multiple color options. Color schemes, header graphics and business information are easy to change.
• Easy to update and publish -  You don’t need a webmaster to publish new pages to your website or make changes to existing ones. And since this theme is based on the WordPress Content Management System, updating a website is as easy as using Microsoft Word. You can add as many pages as you want and the dynamic navigation menus adjust automatically.
• Optimized for top local search results – The architecture of this theme is based on the creator’s experience in optimizing hundreds of websites for top local search results on Google. Solid SEO fundamentals are built into this theme, including placement of your business address on every page, service areas, an instant Google Map, and hCard microformats beneath the covers.  With all these powerful SEO features, it will help you to rank on Google faster for your selected keywords.
• Touch-enabled Mobile layouts – Google says that 50% of all searches on mobile devices are for local goods and services. The SmallBiz Theme serves special touch-enabled pages automatically when a mobile a device like iPhone iPad or Android is detected.
• Great Support – Along with the theme, you’ll get a set of Getting Started videos, a robust FAQ, tons of video tutorials, and a Support and Customization Guide.

Get the Smallbiz Theme Now!

What You Need Before You Can Launch Your Website Online

First, you’ll need a domain name, which is the address of your website. You can get a free domain name by signing up and hosting your site with Bluehost.

The domain name should be short, memorable, easy to spell, and have your business name as well as your main keywords in it (i.e. www.GrandAcupuncture.com). Avoid the use of dashes or underscores in your domain name.

Secondly, you’ll need a web host to host your domain name. The one that I use and have been very happy with their service is Bluehost.

Hosting at Bluehost only costs $6.95/month and when you sign up, they will give you a free life time domain name. Additionally, their service allows you to easily install WordPress platform to your site, set up your own email with your domain name as the address. Plus, the customer service is first class!

Whatever you do, don’t get one of those free domains that is hosted on someone else’ website. This is your business so take it seriously.

Components of a Local Business Website

As seen in figure 1 below, the main components of a local business website are the header, the navigation links, the sidebar, the content area, and the footer area.

• The header – The header should contain a professionally designed Logo and a company or business tag line that briefly describes what your business do. Make sure you have a professional looking logo that best represents your business’ image. A professional looking logo is a must  and it’s important for your business’ credibility.
• The Navigation links – Links to the other main pages of your website such as services, about us, resources, contact us, etc. should be right below the header.
• The Right Side Bar – On right side bar, you can include your business’ address, phone number, photos, videos, testimonials, endorsements from 3rd parties, seals/certificates, links to your Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter accounts.
• Content Area – The content area is where you have the content for each specific page. Be sure to incorporate your keywords in the body of the content as well as in the <h1>, <h2> heading HTML tags.
• Footer Area – On the footer areas, you can include information such as copyright, text links to other pages of the site, the cities that your business serve, disclaimers, privacy policy, etc.

In addition to the above points, your website should look trust worthy and professional. That means using professional looking photos and graphics, clean layout, proper color scheme that aligns with your branding, and scannable copywriting.

Note that in the online world, people don’t read, they scan. So make sure you use small paragraphs with bullets and appropriate headings that are bolded throughout the page. By doing this, it makes it easier for your visitors to scan your website content and quickly understand your messages.

Get Your Website Created Now!

The bottom line is having a professional looking website for your business is essential for your business’ survival and growth. With all the tools and resources available that make it so easy for you to create and setup your website, There is NO excuse for you to NOT have a website!

Resources to Create and Setup Your Website

Below are everything that you need to set up and create a professional looking website for your local business:

1. Get Hosting and free Domain at Bluehost
2. Get hundreds of designers to compete and design a professional looking logo for you at 99Designs.
3. Get the Smallbiz Professional WordPress theme – Allow you to easily setup your website in minutes. Another alternative for you to be able to easily create your website in minutes is the website creation solution from Homestead.
4. Get attractive looking photos and images from Fotolia.com to enhance the look and feel of your website.

In today’s business environment, creating visibility for your business on the Internet is of utmost importance. As you know, people don’t use the Yellowbook anymore.

Nowadays, everyone use Google to find local businesses and services. As such, it is important for your business to appear on top of Google’s search result listings for the keywords related to your local small business.

And in order for your business’ website to get found on Google, you must do SEO, which stands for Search Engine Optimization.

SEO is not difficult to understand at all. You don’t need to have a PhD or a geek to do SEO. SEO is quite straight forward, but it does require some planning and hard works to get good results.

SEO has 5 components:

• Perform keyword research to find keywords related to your business.
• Creating great content on your site around those keywords.
• Perfecting the meta tag content.
• Promote your website using social media channels and PR.
• Build backlinks to your website.

I’ll discuss the above components in more details below. Read on…

How to do Keyword Search

The first step and it’s also a very important aspect of SEO is to find keywords related to your business. Here are the things to consider when selecting keywords for your website.

• Does the keyword have sufficient number of searches per month?
• How strong is the competition in your local market for those keywords?

You’d have to balance the two. Obviously, you’d want to have keywords that bring you the most traffic. But you also have to consider the strength of your competitors and how likely you have a chance to rank on the top 5 positions on Google.

You can use the free Google Keyword tool to do your keyword research.

Here are the steps you should follow to do your keyword research using the Google Keyword tool.

1. Type in your target keyword phrase into the “find keywords” box. Since your business is local, your keyword phrase should contain your targeted keyword phrase + a geographic modifier (i.e. San Jose dentist”. For example, if you are a dentist in downtown San Jose, your keyword phrase could be something like, “Dentist in downtown San Jose”. You can use names of towns, states, counties, metro areas, communities as the geographic modifiers.Also, make sure you click on the “exact match” option and make sure the “location” says “United States.”
2. Check out the keyword ideas returned by Google. You can look through this list of related keywords and pick a few that are most related to your business and have high number of searches per month (preferably more than 200). You only want to look at the “local monthly searches” column.
3. Do some searches on Google for a few of these keywords. Check out the listing on the 1st page of Google. These are competiting websites. Check them out and assess their strengths.
4. After doing your research and analysis, pick a few keywords that you want to focus your SEO efforts on.

Perfecting the Meta Tag content

The 2 most important meta tag for SEO is the meta title tag and the meta description tag.

• Meta title tag – The meta title tag has the most impact on SEO. You’re limited to only 65 characters for your meta title tag so make sure you choose your words carefully. The most important words should appear first. You can also combine multiple keywords in the title tag. An example of a effective title tag would be “san jose dentist | cosmetic dentistry in san jose”.
• Meta Description tag – The description meta tag doesn’t have direct impact on SEO anymore. But it still can indirectly affect SEO. Having a compelling description with strong call to actions can attract more clicks on Google search results page. If you consistently get higher clicks than your competitors, that’s a useful and positive signal to Google. An example of a description meta tag would be, “Phoenix dentistry has been serving the San Jose community since 2000. Clean office, no wait time. Call now to get $50 off teeth whitening for new customers.” You should limit the content of your meta description tag to 150 characters max.

Creating Great Content for Your Website

Now that you have an idea of what keyword phrases you should optimize your site for, it’s time to create the content for your website. You should have content for key pages such as the home page, the service page, and resource pages.

With more and more websites joining the World Wide Web, it’s more important now than ever to create useful and educational content for your website. Content is what will help your site rise to the top of the search engine search results.

In addition to the content for your homepage, you should create as many useful and educational articles as you can. The content should be about topics that is related to your business and should provide useful and educational information to your target audience.

Your content should combine texts, images, and videos to provide the visitors with the best possible experience, while giving the visitors enough information about your business and services. If you use images or photos, be sure to incorporate your targeted keywords in the  “alt” tag.

Also, it’s important that you weave in your keywords in the texts portion of your content. Repeat it a few times, but don’t over do it. Your writing should appear natural and logical.

Your homepage should target the more general keyword (i.e. dentist in san jose) and your service page could go into depth about each service that you provide (i.e. cosmetic dentistry).

Get Your Pages Indexed by the Search Engines

After you have done the above and have created your content, it’s important to let the search engines know of your web pages’ existence. You have to ensure that all the pages are indexed.

The best way to get your website and webpage indexed by the search engine is to get links to each of your main web pages. To get links to your web pages, you can bookmark each of your web page using bookmarking services such as digg.com, mixx.com, or furl.net. You can also create an ad on Craigslist.org and make a link to your web page or get a link to your web page from another website.

In addition, you should create a site map of your site using an XML site map tool on the website, XML-Sitemaps.com. The file should have the name sitemap.xml. After your sitemap.xml file has been created, just upload the site map file to the root directory of your web server(www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml) , and submit your site map in Google Webmaster (http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/), Yahoo (https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com) and MSN (http://webmaster.live.com).

Promoting Your Site Using Social Media Channels and PR

Google and Bing have indicated they are incorporating social signals into their ranking algorithms. It’s more important than ever to use social media channels and PR to promote your business name and your website. Follow these steps:

1. Create a profile for your business in Facebook, Twitter, Google +, and linkedin. These are the top 4 most important ones. You might not have the time to manage all these accounts. So pick 1-2 to start first. Facebook and twitter is great if you sell to consumers. Google+ and linkedin are more appropriate for the business audience.
2. Embed social media sharing features on your website and encourage visitors to “like”, “tweet” or share your content.
3. Write press releases to promote your business. You can use PRweb.com to create your press releases. Note that this can be quite expensive so you only need to do this 1-2 times a  year.

Building Backlinks to Your Site

Building backlinks used to be the main SEO weapon. It is still a very important component of your SEO strategy.

A link to your site is like a vote of confidence for your site. If Google believes your web page to be a high authority and high quality web page for the particular keywords that the searchers are typing in the Google search box, your web page will have a high chance of appearing on the 1st page of the Google search results.

The key is to get links from high authority websites. High authority sites are sites that have high PR ranking.

When you get links back to your web page, you’d want to ensure the anchor text of the link is the same as the keywords you are trying to optimize your web page for.

Anchor text is simply the text with the blue underlined link. For example, instead of a link that just have your website URL, it would be better if the hyperlink is something like, “if you need acupuncture treatment, you should visit Grand Acupuncture in downtown Oakland.”

In this example, “Grand Acupuncture in downtown Oakland” would be the anchor text that links to the Grand Acupuncture website (i.e. www.grandacupuncture.com).

This is key because it indicates to the search engines what the topic of your web page is about and helps to optimize your ranking for the keyword “Grand Acupuncture in downtown Oakland.”

Here are some popular ways to get links to your site:

• Exchange link with partner sites – If there are businesses that offer complimentary services or products to your business, you can send an email to the owner or webmaster and ask for a link exchange. If email doesn’t work, you should use the phone. You should only exchange  links with non-competing sites and businesses that are related to yours. It doesn’t make sense to get a link from a pizza site when your site is about Chiropractic.
• Submit your site to directories – The 2 directories which have high PR ranking and worth getting links from are www.DMOZ.org and Yahoo Directory. DMOZ is free, but the process to get your site listed usually takes longer. Yahoo charges an annual fee of $299. It is worth the money to try to get your site listed in these 2 main directories. You can also search on Google for vertical directories that are related to your business. The other 2 directories that are worth getting listed on are BOTW.org     and Business.com.
• Get links from school, local business organizations (Chamber of Commerce), local directories, and local blogs – For school, you may sponsor an event or offer to buy uniforms for the baseball team in exchange for a link to your site. For local blogs, you should contact the owner of the blog and ask the owner to link to your site or you can propose to write a guest blog post for the site.
• Bookmarking sites – Some of the popular bookmarking sites are delicious.com, digg.com, reddit.com, faves.com, stumbleupon.com, magnolia.com, furl.com, blinklist.com. These are social media sites and it’s where people usually go to share their favorite websites. When someone bookmarks a page from your website, it is like a vote for your website content. The more people that bookmark your website, the more it helps you with your SEO ranking. Just go there, sign up for an account, and bookmark the URL of one or more of your website pages.
• Article Writing – Article writing is a powerful method of building backlinks to your site. You can write a 400-500 words article that is related to your business (i.e. how chiropractic can cure a back pain, how to protect your back, etc.) and submit them to article directories such as ezinearticles.com, articlebase.com, isnare.com, goarticles.com, etc. Your articles should be informative and educational in nature. At the end of the article, you are allowed to include a link back to your website in the author’s bio or resource box.  Getting links back to your website is a key and worthy benefit of writing articles. See Appendix 8 for an example of an Author’s Resource box. Again, be sure to include the main keyword and the location of your business in the hyperlink. Also, it’s better to submit a unique article to each of the directories.
• Web 2.0 Properties and Blogs – In addition to writing articles and submitting them to article directories, you could also write informative/educational content that is related to your business and post these articles on blogs or Web 2.0 properties. For blogs, you could use Blogger.com, WordPress.com, or Tumblr.com. They will host a blog for you for free. For Web 2.0 properties, you could publish your content on sites such as Squidoo.com, Hubpages.com, Ehow.com, Scribd.com, Weebly.com, Wetpaint.com. Again, Be sure to write content that is educational and informative and then have links pointing back to your home page or other relevant pages on your website.
• Press Releases – Writing press releases is another powerful method of promoting your business/website and getting links back to your site. A good company to use is PRWeb.com. When you submit your news releases to PRWeb, they will be indexed by search engines like Google, sent to top news sites like Yahoo! News and placed into RSS feeds with over 250,000 subscribers which include bloggers, journalists and consumers. Additionally, PRWeb helps to generate backlinks and inbound links from other premium sites to your own website. This help build your website’s credibility in search engines.

Building links to your website does take a lot of works, but it will significantly boost your search engine rankings performance if you make the efforts to work at it.

You don’t have to do it all at once. In fact, it is best to continuously work at it here and there. This makes it seem more natural to the Search Engines. You should build links to your home page as well as to the other important pages (products, services pages) in your website.

If you don’t have the time, you can hire an SEO expert to do some of the link building for you. These efforts will build a bunch of links to your website and can boost your organic search rankings.

You should know by not that the Internet provide business owners with low cost opportunities to create exposure for your business and dramatically boost your revenue.

The main ways people discover your business on the Internet are by using Search Engines or Social Media sites such as Facebook, blogs, forums, Twitter, Linkedin, and Youtube.

Social Media

Social networking sites are where people gather to share and discuss about different topics. Social networking sites are where you should go to build your brand, increase your exposure, and manage your reputation.

To get started, you should first create a profile and fill out the necessary information about your business. And then you should contribute to the discussion by sharing your knowledge, ideas, and insights and responding to comments and questions from others.

The main social networking sites you should participate in Facebook, Linkedin, and Twitter.

Search Engines

Using Search Engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing is definitely the main method for people to look for local goods and services. Among the Search Engines, Google is the “king” right now.

There are essentially 3 ways for your business to be found on the Search Engines when someone enter a search term in the Google search box: Organic Listing, Local Listing, and Pay Per Click (PPC) Sponsored listing.

In the example below in Figure A, a searcher enters in “Chiropractor in Chicago” in the Google search box and Google returns the results from the local business listing, the organic listing, and the PPC sponsored listing.

If you want to maximize the chance of your business getting found by your prospects, then you should try to get your business appear in all 3 listings:

• Organic listing – Organic listing is free, but requires you to do some Search Engine Optimization efforts for the keywords that you want to rank for. In the example above, the keyword phrase would be “Chiropractor in Chicago.”
• Local Listing – This is also free. Google as well as the other big search engines are now featuring the local search results on the top of the search results when they detect that your are trying to search for a local product or service. If you include the zip code or city name in the search box, that’s a good indication that you are searching for a local product or service.
  In order to get your business shown in the Local Listing results, you must complete your business information and profile in the Google Places, Yahoo! Local, and Microsoft live local business directories.
• Pay Per Click Sponsored Listing – Getting your ads shown in the Pay Per Click sponsored area costs you money, but you only pay when someone clicks on your ad. Hence, it is called Pay Per Click. The Search Engines use an auction system to determine which your position your ads get shown. So it depends on the # of businesses competing on the same keywords, the cost per click you’re willing to pay, and the quality score. Quality score is based on several factors, which include the Click Through Rate of your ads (the higher the better), the quality of your website, and how relevant are your ads and landing page to the search terms.