Do the Search Engines Cost Money?

Yes and no. If you are fortunate enough to have great organic placement of your site within the search engines, there is no cost for that listing (aside from the time and money you committed to marketing to help make that organic placement happen). If you need to supplement the traffic you receive from organic placement, you can pay for inclusion on the search results pages with pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. In Google, this is called AdWords, and these are the listings you see at the top and down the right hand side of the results pages. The cost of these ads is determined by the competitiveness of your industry’s keywords and your desired placement on the page.