Your Guide To Search Engine Marketing
By Peter Brittain - Managing Director of Northland Digital | Slinky Internet Marketing
Search Engine Marketing or SEM is a broad term that encompasses all efforts made to generate leads and achieve sales from the search engines. Search engine optimization, Pay per click Management, and Landing page optimization all come under the umbrella of Search Engine Marketing The phrase Search engine Marketing is used in a variety of contexts, however, Pay per click Management is the most comprehensive types of search engine marketing service.
The ultimate goal of Search Engine Marketing is to promote websites on the World Wide Web by increasing their visibility on search engine (Google, yahoo, msn search) results pages. The Internet offers tremendous potential to market products and services and there are many who try to capitalize by using attention seeking banner advertisements and pop-ups. However, it is proved that this type of advertisement fails to attract people in fact people are more likely to have a negative impression of sites that have these pop-ups.
Search Engine Marketing is a genuine, effective and reputable marketing strategy for increasing online business. SEM has seen exponential growth in the past one year and it is estimated that more than 9.5 billion dollars were spent on Search Engine Marketing by advertisers in North America alone.
Search engines are indispensable to the Internet and help and guide people find what they are looking for on the Internet in the shortest possible time. Google leads the market with over 70% market share followed by Yahoo with a market share of 20%. It's no wonder that search engines have proved most effective in attracting targeted and quality traffic. It's common practice for Internet users to go to a search engine such as Google and look for the product or service they need.
Businesses need to position their websites in such a way that search engines display their web address in results. SEM makes sure that only people looking for a product or service you specialize in see your advertisement. This means SEM directs targeted traffic to your website.
There are some search engine marketing companies that assure a certain number of hits to your web address. However, there is a price the client company has to pay per click. On the other hand, it is unethical to make such promises. It is difficult to guarantee top ranking to websites, but it is possible to guarantee top ranking on smaller search engines.
The best way to judge your search engine marketing is by results displayed. Leads, sales and customer phone calls are what reflect on the effectiveness of your search engine marketing strategy and not page hits or rankings.
It is recommended that businesses should focus on creating and managing good websites, having sponsored links via Adwords to achieve the desired results.
Peter Brittain is a director of Slinky Internet Marketing who have been leaders in the search engine optimisation business in Australia since 1999. Peter also writes a blog on internet marketing and owns Australian directory & search engine - Slinky Directory.
