Understanding Co-op Searching

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What is cooperative searching? Simply put, it involves sharing your advertising expenses with some of your competition. Pooling your money to buy relevant search terms to lower your own advertising costs is a new twist on an old idea of sharing expenses.

We offer an easy way to ensure that your business has a strong presence on Google without all the hassle of managing the account yourself, and at a fraction of the price.

It’s a simple concept: we build a webpage that is a list of offerings in a particular market, with a small amount of information (this is a tagline) about each business. Each entry in the list links to a website with more information about the business.

We don’t build the individual websites. In order to achieve success from the idea of cooperative search marketing each business needs a stand alone website. The stronger, the better, because you are on the link page with your competition, remember?

Each cooperative page we design will be divided into an appropriate number of shares based on current pricing of relevant Google search terms and the number of competing businesses in a market, always keeping in mind that we don’t want the page to include all of your competition. You can purchase all of the shares yourself or call your friendly competitors to encourage them to join you on the page by dividing up the price of all the shares. Or you can simply buy one share.

What are the benefits? The greatest benefit is simplicity. No more worrying about how to structure a campaign on Google. Cooperative Marketing will sort through the complexities of the Google search program, leaving you free to concentrate on your business. An additional benefit is that you will be associated with strong domain names and search terms that are relevant to your business.

Is a long term commitment required? Many of our cooperative pages offer either a monthly payment option or an annual plan. You’ll save money by choosing the yearly option, but if you are unsure about the cooperative concept and how it can improve your business, you can try it month to month.

Can I get reports about how many clicks the cooperative page is receiving? We’ll send out a quarterly report to all businesses active on a cooperative page during the quarter. We recommend that you also have your webmaster provide a report that shows you the source of visits to your page. That’s where you will see just how many visitors are finding your website by clicking through our paid ads to the cooperative page, then on to your designated page. Even without all of that, you can simply search for terms relevant to your business on Google to find the ads that Cooperative Marketing is buying on your behalf.