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Search marketing
Simply put, search engine marketing (or SEM) is using search engines to market your products and services. There are 2 basic options for SEM, each of which has its pros and cons. These are search engine optimisation (SEO) and pay per click marketing (PPC) (once referred to by a client as “paper clip” marketing – you’ve got to love it!). So what are they?
Pay per click (PPC)
This involves placing short text ads on search engines and associated ad networks. As an advertiser there are 2 key parts to your activity. First you select the keywords that you want to trigger the display of your adverts, then you write a short text advert for your offering. When a visitor to a search engine (the user) enters a search term, the search engine serves up adverts of advertisers whose keywords best match the search.
You are not charged when these ads are shown, as with most traditional media, but when someone clicks on your ad, hence pay per click. The amount that you pay is determined by an on-going real-time auction in which advertisers bid for keywords. The more popular (or valuable) keywords are more expensive. The higher your bid, the nearer to the top of the listing your ad will appear.
That’s the simple bit, add in the fact that more popular ads get pushed up the rankings, that your ads should be relevant to your keyword and your offering and that some PPC campaigns involve millions or terms and you can see that it can rapidly get very complicated.
Search engine optimisation (SEO)
The aim of a search engine is to present its users with what they are looking for when they type in a search term. To do this they create their own view on what each web page on the www is about and list that page accordingly. Some search engines do this by reading each page of the web automatically (crawling) and scoring them according to their own top secret rules. Others review sites manually to create their listing, or directory. The big players are now doing both, Google the search engine has introduced Google directory, and Yahoo, traditionally a directory, now leads with its search option.
Each search engine has a set of rules about how a page is ranked. These rules are known as algorithms. For obvious reasons the search engines do not disclose the algorithms they use to rank pages, but it is generally agreed that the most important elements that influence a page's rankings include:
- Keywords in the title tag
- Keywords in links pointing to the page
- Keywords appearing in visible text
- Link popularity (PageRank for Google) of the page·
- Alt and meta tags
- And much more ...
The aim of search engine optimisation is to build a website so that it is categorised by the search engines as you would like it to be categorised if you could write your own entry. You could say that you are reverse engineering your entry. This involves a degree of understanding on how the engines work (especially the current algorithms, as they change regularly) and expertise from strategy through to implementation.
As with most things, you can cheat with search engines optimisation, but if you get caught you can get into trouble (BMW was removed from Google for a day last year!). We recommend playing by the rules, as this will build a better long term campaign.
Which is for you? – the pros and cons
Here are some thoughts …
| PPC | SEO | |
| Pros | quick flexible accountable measurable controllable "guaranteed" results |
Long-term benefits Low cost once established No media cost Achievable through best practice web development |
| Cons | Set up costs On-going costs User sceptism (a significant %age of users don't click on the ads) |
Set up may be costly slow moving hard to measure no guarantees subject to changes in algorithm |
| Summary |
Market driven - you get what you pay for |
Art not a science, where well presented quality content will win the day |
