Search Engine Marketing Today

Introduction to Search Engine Marketing today

Search Engine Marketing generates revenue larger than TV channels earn for selling their advertising time. It is a market that is only based on web users seeking out products, services, media and general information.

The challenge is to gain visibility from where your customers spend their time online. Search Engines are constantly striving to provide web users with straightforward, recent and appropriate results. Because of this, the Search Engines provide the ideal platform to display advertisements and gain visibility. This can be achieved through two options within the Search Engine results, Organic results and Pay Per Click (PPC) results;

• Organic (also known as ‘natural’) results are ranked and determined automatically by the Search Engine, these results can be improved through Search Engine Optimisation activities and are designed to display the most relevant, current and trusted sources that meet the users search criteria.
• Pay Per Click results are generally determined by an ongoing auction process that involves bidding an amount on chosen search terms that the target audience will use. PPC results can guarantee advertisers visibility for more targeted terms and the advertiser is only charged if someone clicks on their advertisement.

Linking your existing identity throughout all online and offline marketing activity is an important part of building a strong reputation and relationship with your customers.

According to research conducted by Hitwise UK in March 2008, four out of ten UK Internet visits came directly from Search Engines. Search Engine marketing is focused on targeted advertising campaigns based on specific keywords. It creates high value lead generation and an extremely cost effective promotional environment for website owners and marketers. If search marketing does not become a key part of an organisations marketing mix, the competition can easily take full advantage of the 24/7 visibility and reap the associated benefits.

Search Engine Marketing in more detail

Marketing websites through Search Engines allows qualified traffic to be generated, this is because people have already typed a criteria into the Search Engine. Their criteria entered is queried against the Search Engines Database and relevant websites will be displayed.

The Wikipeida definition of Marketing is:

“Marketing is an ongoing process of planning and executing the marketing mix (Product, Price, Place, Promotion often referred to as the 4 Ps) for products, services or ideas to create exchange between individuals and organizations.”

Interestingly, Wikipedia references the the four new P’s that are now more common due to technology making such a strong impact. These new P’s are:

• Personalization: Where people are now receiving marketing messages that are specifically targeted to their needs.

• Participation: When people who use the brand are participating with a real experience that is associated with the brand.

• Peer-to-Peer: Consumers are now able to interact with other consumers, discussing and recommending the brands that they trust and have used. Messages created by the big brands may not be as strong as they used to be, the Internet allows a open platform for the consumer message to come through.

• Predictive modeling: Predicting the outcomes of consumers from the actions that are taken with marketing activity’s.

In the cut-throat world of internet business, one of the most important considerations is how to draw visitors to your website. You could have the most exciting and original content, the most innovative approach and the best features of any site around, but if nobody knows the site exists then it will not do any good. One of the key factors in becoming a success online is to have your website well placed on the popular search engines and to effectively advertise your product or services.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

SEO is the practice of matching your content to how you wish to be found. This may involve keyword writing or meta-tags with keyword lists and other more subtle tweaks. You cannot control exactly what people will search for, and hence you cannot control exactly what the user will find. This means that you cannot decide in advance which of your pages will get the most visits.

There has been some controversy surrounding certain SEO practices that make the content suffer, such as being too heavy on keywords, and the major search engines will penalize a website for overuse these days. This means that if you choose to go down the SEO path, make sure you get someone who really knows what they’re doing or they may end up with the opposite effect.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising

With pay-per-click advertising, you get advertising space on a website, and pay only when somebody clicks the link. While this can lead to increased traffic to your website and increased sales, you must ensure that the provider you choose has adequate protection measure in place against “click fraud”.

Another form of PPC advertising comes in the form of search engine services like Google AdWords. This gives you not only paid inclusion in search engine results but also advertising across a range of subscriber sites. You can even use image, banner and video ads with this method.

Pay-per-click advertising is one of the most flexible internet marketing methods available, in comparison to other website marketing techniques it provides instant, targeted results to boost your customer enquires.

Other Methods

There are other ways to advertise online such as buying advertising space for your banner or video ads on popular websites. Some will offer an advertising model where you pay for space rather than clicks. Other online marketing methods offer pay for impressions, where you pay for a predefined amount of impressions that your advert will be displayed to potential customers. This can be very effective if the advertisement is placed on a complimentary website.