Search Engine Marketing | Internet Marketing Ireland
SEM | Defining Search Engine Marketing
SEM or Search Engine Marketing (also known
as Search Marketing or Internet Marketing)
is all about using the internet, and in particular the search engines
results pages, or SERPs, to advertise your products or services through
your own web site. This is done by purchasing sponsored listings on other
sites, or opting into one of the major search engine's paid schemes. The
birth of SEM/IM can be traced back to 2001, when Overture
was launched as the first 'pay per click' search engine. Despite the fact
that SEM is more expensive than natural Search
Engine Optimisation, it is a form of Online Marketing that has
enjoyed unprecedented growth since its inception, becoming the darling
of advertisers. There are many reasons for its popularity, topmost of
them is the speed and ease with which you can set up your campaign. Nowadays
Overture has become Yahoo, and has ceded much of it's market share to the giant Google, whose own PPC system (Adwords)
has been steadily increasing its market share, and now MSN has joined
the battle. With the
PPC industry currently raking over $3 billion annually from web site advertisers,
we can expect even more competition in the future.
SEM | Search Engine Marketing is not Search Engine Optimisation
It can be easy to mix up these two disparate methods of driving traffic to
your web site, but the easist way to understand the distinction is perhaps
to consider Search Engine Marketing as an additional
last step of the overall Search Engine Optimisation process, or as a separate
marketing strategy altogether. Search Engine Optimisation
is by nature a gradual, ongoing process, relying as it does on adapting
your web site design and content in such a way as to
make it more attractive, and therefore more easily indexed and better
ranked, to search engine spiders. This process entails a lot of work in
the site's design and coding, and in the building and maintenance of favourable
relationships with other online companies. On the other hand, Search
Engine Marketing appears to be a quick fix, but at a cost. Usually,
SEM requires little or no extra work to be done on your
site. Instead, your efforts are concentrated on the creation of banner
or text ads, paying for their inclusion in the SERPs or on the pages of
other sites, then monitoring closely how successful or not your campaign
is, and altering and tweaking the campaign to ensure the best possible results.
SEM | Search Engine Marketing advantages
There are some obvious advantages Search Engine Marketing
(SEM) has over Search Engine Optimization:
- Tracking is easy. Rather than having to wait for months to see the
effect of your camapign, the success of any given keyword can be measured
within days. This is especially true of Google, thanks to their comprehensive Analytics program.
- Guaranteed success. If you want your listing to be top,
then you simply outbid your competitors.
- Landing pages. Rather than being at the mercy of a search engine spider who
may pull up pages of your web site that aren't exactly the page you might
have chosen for that particular term, you can specify exactly where the visitor
arrives on your site, and create pages that are wholly designed for a particular search term.
- Immediacy. Your listing becomes active almost instantaneously.
- No alterations. Your site can be top listed without having to make any changes
to its content or layout.
- No extra work. Its an auction, so you don't have to spend time ensuring
that you've submitted it to all the right search engines and directories.
For a much more detailed discussion of exactly what Search Engine
Marketing options are available to you, please click on the links
below:
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