The American Marketing Association defines ‘green marketing’ as “the marketing of products that are presumed to be environmentally safe”. This includes modifying advertising. Search engine optimization (SEO) is green marketing because it saves business owners money while promoting their website in a way that is proven to work while not harming the environment.

With the state of the world’s economy today, it makes logical sense to focus on online marketing campaigns. The internet is a cheap and incredibly effective location for advertising. Macy’s stores had decreases in their sales last Christmas, while their website saw an increase of sales by thirty-nine percent. Clearly, people are turning to the web for their shopping needs and that gives great opportunity to advertisers. While pay-per-click ads, pop-ups, and banners are one way to market online, many surveys have found that consumers become annoyed with these aggressive advertising tactics. SEO is a much better form of green marketing because it helps the consumer find what they are looking for in a non-forceful, organized way.

Some businessmen are still wary of spending money on “untested” SEO strategies. However, SEO is quickly proving itself to be an excellent way to attract interested consumers without a lot of wasted spending. SEO is clearly a greener form of marketing than mass mailings, saves more money than television or radio commercials, and still affords you the opportunity to take advantage of traditional marketing techniques such as catalogs or newsletters by moving them online. Actually, the latter methods can aid you in your SEO campaign, as they can be optimized with keywords for greater results.

How much money can SEO save a business? One professional programmer wrote an online tool which measures how much a site saves by ranking organically (coming up on the regular search listing) compared to buying traffic through pay-per-click advertising. For a small company in a niche market with an average of several hundred visitors a day the savings turned out to be about two thousand dollars a month adding up to over twenty-five thousand dollars a year. This tool only measured how the business ranked in Google, so adding in other search engines like Yahoo! would increase the savings even more.

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