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Search Engine Marketing

In the race to win on the web, search engine marketing (SEM) is one of the most important marketing activities you can undertake because it focuses on one of the most important factors to your success: improving your website’s visibility in the search engines. And since search is the most popular activity for the 1.67 billion people around the world who use the Internet (according to figures released recently by comScore, more than 113 billion searches were carried out in July 2009), an incremental improvement in your search engine ranking could translate into a substantial increase in traffic to your website which could, in turn, lead to a substantial increase in business.

As the facts on Internet search behavior show, searchers are buyers:

• 33% of people of all searchers are shopping [1]
• 77% of people of people who research online before purchasing use search to do it [2]

The fact that search engine marketing enables you to position your business in front of people who are actively looking to buy the types of products and services you sell – or, at least, information on the types of products and services you sell to assist them in making purchasing decisions – is the most significant difference between search engine marketing and other forms of online and offline marketing.

Searchers, in other words, are buyers.

Search Engine Marketing is Cost Effective

Search engine marketing is simply the most cost effective form of marketing you can employ, according to a report comparing the costs of lead acquisition by Piper, Jaffray & Co:

• Search – $0.45
• Email – $0.55
• Yellow Pages – $1.18
• Banner Ads – $2.00
• Direct Mail – $9.94

The bottom line is that search engine marketing can deliver qualified buyers to you at lower costs than through other marketing channels.

Search Engine Marketing Targets Two Types of Results

SEM targets two types of search results primarily through a combination of search engine optimization, social media optimization, and pay-per-click advertising.

Natural Search Results

• Natural or organic search results represent a search engine’s “best match” for the keywords searchers enter into the query bar and encompass a number of different search categories:
  • Web
  • Images
  • Video
  • Maps/Local business results
  • News

Paid Search Results

• Paid placement (such as Google AdWords, Microsoft AdCenter, and Yahoo Search Marketing) allows you to pay to have your ads displayed on search engine results  pages in response to keywords searchers use – regardless of how well the page actually matches a searcher’s query
• Paid inclusion ensures that your site’s pages have been indexed by the search site so they can appear on the results pages if they closely match an organic search query

While statistics show that the clickthrough rates (CTR) for natural results are higher than for paid search results, improving your website’s performance in both areas should figure into your overall search engine marketing strategy.

Five Keys to Getting Search Engine Marketing Right

As with every other aspect of online marketing – or marketing in general – managing search engine marketing as a systematic, step-by-step process will help you avoid costly miscues and ensure you get the best return on investment.

Following are the key steps you must take in order to achieve search engine marketing success:

1. Define the goals of your website – what do you expect your website to accomplish (making online/offline sales, generating leads, increasing brand awareness, providing customer service through information, etc)?
2. Determine the success metrics for your website – how will you know if your website is a success or a failure (rank, traffic volume, referral sources, time on site, bounce rate, page views, conversion ratios, etc)?
3. Determine the success metrics for your search marketing efforts – how will you know if your search marketing efforts have produced a solid return on time, effort, money investment ( improvements in rank, traffic volume, referral sources, time on site, bounce rate, page views, conversion ratios, etc)?
4. Define your strategy – what will be the scope of your search marketing efforts, what approaches will you employ, and what are the estimated costs in time, money,  and effort
5. Develop a business case to justify (and measure the return on) the investment – what do you expect the financial benefits to be, how long do you anticipate it will take to reach a breakeven point, what are the risks (what could go wrong that would undermine success), and what do you projected the overall return on investment to be?

It’s a process of continuous improvement – of the process that produces results and, therefore, of the results themselves.

Contact me for more information or for help with your marketing efforts.

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[1] & [2] Search Engine Marketing, Inc.: Driving Search Traffic to Your Company’s Web Site (2nd Edition) (p. 20)