Use Search Engine Marketing (SEM) to your Advantage

SEM (Search Engine Marketing) is simply the use of search engines to market your business.  If you sell in demand products or services, then utilising search engines to get your message to a new audience can be hugely profitable.

As with all forms of advertising it is a question of cost vs. return.  For search engine marketing there are two methods to sell your products and services.  They are pay per click (PPC) and search engine optimisation (SEO).

Pay per click (PPC)

To utilise PPC effectively you must ensure that your ad catches the eye.  It is in competition with a lot of results on a search engine result page, and you only have a limited space to get your sales message across.  Every word in your ad is important.  Professional ad writers have stated that a change in one word can be the difference between 1 click and hundreds.

The second part relates to the keywords and demographics being targeted. It’s very important that the keywords you pick to deliver your ad are relevant to the product or service that you are selling to the right customer. Don’t restrict to only standard keywords you know of, but do some research of other keywords that your customers may be thinking of that may trigger interest in your offernings.

It is not just the ad and keyword which have to do the business.  Your site’s landing page has to do the business as well.  Landing page design is an art in itself.  To make a PPC campaign profitable, you must ensure your page looks professional, is clear with instructions, and has big clear forms and or buttons which make it obvious what to do next.  Your landing page and your ads and keywords should have context with one another.

If you can pull this off then your PPC campaign could be massively profitable.  PPC works on a bidding system a little like eBay where you pay for position.  So if your bid limit is £10, and your highest competitor bid is £8, you should appear first.

Organic SEO

The other way to market your business on search engines is to invest in an organic SEO campaign.  Instead of marketing via ads, you make use of onsite and offsite SEO elements to help appear organically in the search listings following a keyword search.  Costs can be a little murky but the results tend to be better than paid ads as they tend to be more trusted by users.

The downside to search engine marketing is that it can take time to get right, regardless of which route you go down.  Organic SEO can also take time and there are pitfalls which are easy to fall in.  Most businesses which successfully utilise search engine marketing normally use both PPC and organic methods.

TIP: To learn more about what is SEO, please click here.

Bring in Customers and Clients via Search Engines

With the draw of search engine marketing being potentially massive profits, it is too big a marketing opportunity to turn down.  It has pitfalls however, and this is where our expertise comes into play.  Talk to us about marketing your site on search engines today.  Click here to learn more about our SEO services, or click here and complete the contact form in order to discuss your online marketing needs.  The sooner you do, the sooner you can capture the market share from your competitors.

What is SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)?

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the practice of tweaking and improving websites, together with other various online marketing techniques to improve search engines rankings (In simpler terms, to show your site first for a given keyword or phrase typed into a search engine).

Another way to put this is that if you sell shoes online, and someone types in ‘wedding shoes’ on Google, your site should appear prominently in the search results.  Ideally, at the top.

Organic Results

In our example this kind of result is known as an organic search result.  It is not a paid ad which can appear at the top of search results.  To get your site to the top of a search engine organically requires three aspects to be on point.  They are;

  • Onsite SEO elements
  • Offsite SEO elements
  • Site Performance

Onsite SEO Elements

Onsite or on-page SEO elements are effectively signals which are detected by search engine crawlers, sometimes called spiders or robots, and tell the search engine what your site is about.   Although there are a lot of elements involved in onsite SEO most of it is governed by keyword phrases.  Search engines will look for phrases that are in the title of the page, the URL, the Meta description, and the content of the copy, together with variances of the keyword phrase on the page.

Taking our example earlier, the keyword phrase ‘girls’ platform shoes’, search engines will analyse millions of results to determine which pages are relevant to the search.  They then sift through the results ordering them by the ‘best’ match.  They then display these results to the searcher.

How they determine the best match is strongly determined by the on-site SEO, off-site SEO and site performance.

Offsite SEO

Offsite or off-page SEO involves getting your name and services/products out there on other sites.  It often involves the following;

  • Social media updates
  • Link building – Where another site hyperlinks to your site.
  • Press releases
  • Outreach – Where other blog owners are encouraged to visit your site and comment on a blog post for example
  • Reviews

In essence what search engines are looking for are mentions of your site around the web.  Links are a major determining factor for search engine rankings, and providing the link does not appear artificial, low quality, paid or irrelevant, the more links you have the better your search engine placement.

So when Google ranks results for the keyword ‘girls’ platform shoes’, it will look at what is happening on other sites to determine the ‘best’ order for results.

Site Performance/Usability

If your site has onsite and offsite elements in place but visitors come via a search engine, stay for seconds and leave this is not good news.  Search engines will conclude your site is not relevant to the keyword and stop showing your site as high in the rankings.

Therefore it is important your website appearance and navigation are on point.  Never underestimate the user experience where SEO is concerned.

Contact us for SEO Services

This post scratches the surface of search engine optimisation as the more you explore it the more complex it becomes.  What is clear however is that if you do not have SEO work on your site, you are not going fulfil your potential in terms of visitor numbers.

To get your site on the first page of Google, click here and complete the form.  We can help you get the best out of your site.