Search Engine Marketing
Search engine marketing is a very effective digital marketing channel. Through search marketing, you can increase the visibility of your website in search engines results using paid and unpaid methods. SEM is important because search traffic is targeted and thus more valuable than any other form of traffic you can get with other promotion methods.
What is Search Engine Marketing?
Search Engine Marketing (also known as Search Marketing) is the process of getting traffic from search engines either organically or paid.
Search marketing has two main types: SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and PSA (Paid Search Advertising). SEO is the way to get free traffic from search engines by achieving high rankings in the SERPs and Paid search ads are the process of paying for your ads to appear on search engine results pages.
What is the main goal of Search Marketing?
The overall goal of SEM is to increase visibility by achieving higher rankings in the SERPs (search engine results pages) or top positions for ad placements. Higher ad positions and rankings mean more traffic and this has a number of added advantages. As we will see later, each SEM component has a number of processes and tools.
Importance of Search Marketing
Before getting into the details on SEO and paid search advertising (PSA) and how to use them to get more exposure and traffic from search engines, let’s quickly examine the importance of SEM for the success of a website or online business.
It is a fact that in today’s world the Internet is the source for everything we need to know, learn, ask, buy or do. Whenever we have a question or looking for something, the first thing we do is to turn to a search engine (in the majority of cases Google) and type in our search query.
When we hit SEARCH, we expect to either get a direct answer to our question or a list of resources (and this list includes both ads and websites), that can satisfy our intent. Search engines are working hard to improve the quality of their search results by presenting to the searcher those websites (or ads) that will keep their users happy and come back again for more searches. To do that they have developed complex algorithms that take a number of variables into account before they decide which websites (or ads) to show in the top positions.
Search engine marketing is important because it’s the process to follow to optimize your website or ads so that they appear in the top positions. Your goal is not just to have a presence in search engines but to show up in one of the top 5 positions for the search term (keywords), that matter for your business or website. Statistics show that the majority of users click on one of the top ads or one of the first five organic results.
Search Marketing Types
There are a number of techniques you can follow to improve your presence in search engines (organically) and to achieve higher positions for your ads. As mentioned above, these are grouped into two main types, SEO and PSA.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search engine optimization or SEO is the process of optimizing your website for achieving higher rankings in search engines for certain keywords. SEO principles can also help you create high-quality websites with good content and satisfy the user intent. Until 10 years ago, SEO was about keyword stuffing, publishing mediocre content, and building links but this is not the case today. SEO has become more complex and to get it right, you have to take into account a number of parameters.
To make the whole process easier, it is broken down into the following SEO types:
Technical SEO – optimize your website for the crawling and indexing process so that search engines can discover, read and understand your website.
On page SEO – optimize all pages of your website one by one and give search engines the right signals to understand what your website and individual pages are all about.
Off Page SEO – promote your website on the internet, get good quality backlinks and prove to search engine algorithms that your website deserves to be in one of the top spots for the keywords you want.
Why is SEO important?
Higher rankings, more traffic: If your goal with search marketing is to get traffic to your website without having to pay for ads, then SEO is the way to go. As mentioned above, the websites that appear in the top 3 positions of the organic results get more than 60% of the traffic – This statistic alone explains the importance of SEO.
Search engine traffic is targeted: Open Google and search for anything you want. The websites that appear in the top positions get thousands of visits from Google on a daily basis.Depending on the keywords you used, they are probably making thousands of dollars in revenue (from advertising or selling their own products or services), because search engine traffic is highly targeted.
Unlike traffic coming from Facebook or other social media networks, organic traffic converts better since the users have a clear intent in mind before typing something into Google and it’s not just for curiosity or leisure.
Trust and recognition: Users trust search engines because they know that they have strict rules as to which websites are shown in the search results, and in turn, they trust websites that rank in the top positions.