Search Engine Marketing

What is Search Engine Marketing?

Search engine marketing is the term used for online marketing techniques based on improving results in search engine results pages. We talk a lot about search engine optimisation but these days internet marketing needs a lot more effort that standard, traditional SEO as SEO itself is expanding but there are other techniques that should be considering when entering the SEM area.

There is a lot of different opinions in regards what makes up an SEM campaign, some agencies like to include email broadcasts and video productions, but simply search engine marketing is improving your results on search engines which can be done either in the natural listings or by paid search, making SEM the umbrella term. Also, in the US they refer only to sponsored advertising when speaking about search marketing so be careful not to get the two versions mixed up.

What’s involved in Search Marketing?

For a lot of large companies it’s much more beneficial and effective to work on SEO and PPC at the same time, therefore entering into SEM. Our sister company PPC Junkies are experts at building, managing and optimising Pay-Per-Click campaigns so if you are interested in beginning a new search marketing campaign then this is the place to be.

Social media optimisation is new to search engine optimisation and therefore a big part of the latest search marketing techniques. Ensure that your SEO agency is including social networking website updates, for example on Twitter on Facebook, as part of an SEM project as some companies are still trying to avoid the task of doing it for client websites.

Why is Search Engine Marketing for me?

If you purely base your marketing budget on PPC then you will be paying for the optimisation and management of a campaign as well as the cost of every single click. PPC is expensive but it does allow you to target specific keywords and in some ways is a lot easier to generate traffic and sales by pushing high performing keywords.

Search engine optimisation on the other hand gives you ‘free’ traffic, but optimisation fees can vary quite a lot depending on the type of project and amount of content writing you’re going for. SEO is a long process and claims no guarantees, but once you have achieved some good results it proves extremely effective and valuable marketing method.

Both of these internet marketing techniques have their own benefits as you can see and they fit together brilliantly with opposite advantages. If you’re a start up business or looking to hugely increase your traffic then search engine marketing is definitely for you as it will bring you traffic from different directions, advertise your website in different areas, even out your marketing budget and get your website to the top of Google in double quick time.