Search Engine Marketing Overview

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) incorporates all aspects of building a web site's exposure in the search engines. This includes both “Organic Ranking” and “Pay-Per-Click” advertising. Organic Ranking is achieved through Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to acquire natural positioning in the search result pages (SERP’s). Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising refers to the ‘sponsored-links’ fields of the search pages, which enables anyone to purchase clicks/traffic, with front page ad exposure, for any keyword.

There are 5 primary aspects of Search Engine Marketing:

• Keyword Analysis
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC)
• Local vs National Targeting
• Web Analytics

All the search engines follow similar strategies for ranking sites in the organic results, and all offer PPC advertising. It is estimated that 80% or more of online queries and sales begin with one of the top 5 engines (Forrester Research, 2007). Therefore, SEM is an absolute necessity for online marketing success and should be afforded more importance and budget in the overall marketing strategy, than all other forms of online advertising.

We are all well aware that the internet has single-handedly revolutionized the way commerce happens. Regardless of your product or service - regardless of your target audience, the internet has become everyone’s research tool of choice (with the exception of the elderly). For the foreseeable future, the search engines have established themselves as the dominant interface for pursuing the online research process. Search engines are the gateway for 80-90% of global user interaction with the web. Just ask yourself, when you want to find something where do you look?

Some Hard Cold SEO Facts:

• Depending on your Target Demographic, Google is the solution for +60% of the market.
• Yahoo is currently managing to hold onto about 25%.
• ‘Eye Tracking’ and Search Usability studies, performed by MarketingSherpa®, indicate that approximately:
  • 80% of users find what they are searching for ‘above the fold’ of the very first page. In other words, in the top 5 organic or PPC results for any given search.
  • 90% of users rarely leave the first page of results, and less than 1-2% goes beyond the second.
  • The top 3 organic positions receive the most attention

Moral of the story – If your website is not ranked in the top 20 results on Google or Yahoo, organically or through advertisements, you are virtually invisible to almost everyone online.