You may have helped many websites to get rank on Google’s first page in the past, but that doesn’t mean you’ll get success in doing that in future as well. Hardly any industry has gone on a roller-coaster ride like SEO. Some of the changes have been so radical that many online marketers are yet to get a full grasp over them.

It's 2016 now, and SEO is no longer defined in terms of technical jargons. They were once used to fool clients. But now the clients have wised up. They no longer hesitate to say “I’m least bothered about the report that you sent at the end of every month, what concerns me is when my website will appear on Google’s first page.”

What’s the point of pouring millions into web marketing campaigns, when you don’t have an effective lead-to-sales conversion strategy in place?

None.

It’s like filling a container with water, which has too many leaks in it. The container empties out as soon as you fill it.

The effort your sales team is putting on to bring some excellent leads will never pay off if those leads don’t convert to sales. A prospective client might dismiss the idea of purchasing your service after few rounds of cold-calling, taking you back to the point, from where you started.

In the marketing context, taking the first step is always essential. If you run a service providing company, then getting clients is the first step for you. If you sell a product, then the first step is making users inquire about it.

There’s a term for it, and that term is lead generation. You begin by generating leads, and those leads then turn into sales. The process, however, is easier said than done, and that’s chiefly because marketers commit mistakes, both knowingly and unknowingly, which hamper the lead generation process.

If you have a business, it’s essential to engage in marketing. Because that’s the only way you can expect to attract the attention of your target audience towards your business. When you are successful in doing that, you will be able to gain some return on the investment that you have done for your business. And if you are planning to do the marketing for your business, you just can’t leave out online marketing these days. The reach of the internet is greater than any other thing. It’s a one-stop solution for reaching out to numerous potential customers at one go.

So, you are performing all the online marketing steps for your business. But you are still not satisfied, as you are yet to get the desired results.

Search engines seem to be at the center of the online web based galaxy. And that makes them the main tool for marketers to expand their businesses online and target customers in a highly concentrated manner. This again can be done in two ways – organic (read free) and paid searches.

Google AdWords is easily the King of the paid search platforms used all over the world, with Bing Ads coming in at a distant second position. The popularity of AdWords can be judged from the fact that it was responsible for more than 85% of Google’s overall revenue which exceeded $50 billion in the year 2013. And that again speaks volumes about the popularity of paid search marketing in general.