Search Engine Marketing

Search Engine Marketing is the process of using search engines as a sales mechanism to market your products and services or just to promote your website or a campaign you’re running.

With gaining popularity of the internet, and penetration in emerging markets, search engines are becoming a critical component of Internet usage, as a mechanism to find information and the benefit for business is that customers use search engines to find products and services.

Search Engine Marketing is a much more effective method of marketing and customer acquisition versus traditional marketing methods (such as Television or print media) as it allows you to target your customers, measure your success, and gives you a very low-cost of acquisition, with a return on investment that you can see.

Search Engine Marketing comes in several forms, but the two most popular forms of search engine marketing is Pay Per Click, or PPC, and Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO.

Pay Per Click

Pay Per Click (or PPC for short) is the process of promoting your website in the paid search results. Your website may rank very poorly in the natural SERPs, but from a few dollars per click, you can attract customers for search terms related to your product or service, and this is how PPC has become one of the most popular forms of advertising in the 21st century, netting the likes of Google and Yahoo billions of dollars in advertising revenue per year.

PPC is great because you can launch a new website with no organic search history, and with any size budget immediately bring your website to market. You can measure the number of clicks, set your budget and see the return on your investment by measuring the number of conversions (using Google Analytics) versus the number of clicks and spend required to sell your product.

Search Engine Optimisation

SEO is the process of optimising your website for increased visibility in the search engine, being ranked according to keyword or key term or phrase, and moving your page up in the SERPs, or Search Engine Result Pages of the search engines. The higher your page is in the SERPs, the more likely people are to click on your link, and therefore you will increase traffic, or visitors, meaning your website is exposed to more customers.

The benefit of SEO, is that once your page is ranking well, you don’t have to pay to attract visitors to your site, so unlike PPC, the benefits of Search Engine Optimisation is that your customer attraction is free.