Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is the process of making your website (and therefore your product or service) appear in a prime position on search engine pages. Of course, this is a highly competitive business, with thousand of businesses not only competing for primary positions on web SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), but also thousands of businesses competing for the job to achieve these positions for businesses in the UK.
As a Marketing Manager, you can’t ignore the massive power of the Internet as a marketing tool. E-Marketing has taken the basic traditional marketing strategies and exploded them. Now, without SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), Paid Inclusion and Paid Placement, your product or service will have zero product positioning on the Internet. So what should you do?
Let’s look at the three different areas of SEM:
SEO
Search Engine Optimisation involves optimising a website and its content for the best search engine results when the search engine’s spiders crawl the website each month.
This involves hundreds of potential tweaks and techniques that can be used to increase or improve your results positioning. You should only use techniques that are approved by Google and the other search engines, otherwise you run the risk of having your website banned from them altogether!
The use of keywords and phrases within the content of the website and within meta-tag areas help the spiders to work out what your website is about and where it should fall in the rankings.
Paid Inclusion
You can pay the search engines to include your website in particular indexes of result listings. This is essentially buying your ranking for a yearly fee, although you only usually get a single page for that fee and then there may still be charges per click. There is a thin line between Paid Inclusion and PPC. Paid Inclusion is particularly useful where traditional SEO techniques might not be able to help the website, such as when the advertiser wants to use dynamic pages that do not show up well on Google spider crawls.
Paid Placement (PPC)
Pay per Click, or PPC as it is known, is a marketing method whereby the advertiser only pays when a user clicks on an online advertisement. This click takes the user to the advertiser’s website. PPC Ads can be placed on websites, within search engine results pages, on company blogs and social media sites. Google AdWords is the most successful example of this type of advertising although these days, many other companies use this method of advertising.
Advertisers using PPC generally bid for the most frequently used keywords for their product. These keywords are used within the search terms that a user might type into a search engine. The highest bidder for the chosen terms gets the best position or placement. On Google, these ads appear above the normal SERPs listings and down the right hand side of the page too. This method of advertising is referred to as ‘Sponsored Links’.
No one SEM method will work above the other. To get the best results, a combination of all three methods is advised by SEM experts.
At Impact Media, we can create a tailored package of combined SEM methods that would increase your web visibility and give you the kind of presence on the web that would cost thousands more in the traditional off-line marketing arena. Review our search engine marketing services page for details of how we could help your business grow online.
