SEM, SEO, PPC? Talk English Man!! A Search Engine Marketing Guide

This Search Engine Marketing Guide aims to demystify the complexities of search engine marketing by discussing, in plain English, what the main areas are and how they are useful to businesses.

Search Engine Marketing

Search engine marketing (or SEM for short), as the name suggests, involves the marketing and promotion of your website in the search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN. Search engines are now an integral part of how customers search for, find and select the companies they choose to buy products and services from. When a customer types a keyword or phrase, such as 'beauty products' into a search engine, the search engine returns a variety of results. The customer then uses these results to make their selection.

Search engine marketing techniques are used to ensure that you are included in these results so that you have a chance of being selected by the customer. There are two main areas to search engine marketing - search engine optimisation and pay-per-click advertising. These are discussed in more detail below. By employing both of these techniques successfully and by ensuring you maximise the potential of your budget through correctly allocating your resources across these two, you can greatly benefit from search engine marketing and ranking highly in the search engines. These benefits stretch right to your bottom line - more people visiting your website, means more sales, which means more profit.

Any company, as long as they know what they are doing, can carry out search engine marketing on their own. Other companies decide to use external specialists, such as freedom24, to carry out search engine marketing for them. Whichever route you decide to take, the main point to remember is that search engine marketing has the ability to help your business grow, significantly in many cases. Visit our Search Engine Marketing page to find out about how we can help your business grow.

Search Engine Optimisation

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of getting your website ranked as highly as possible in the 'natural' or 'organic' listings within a search engine such as Google. 'Natural' listings refer to those which a search engine returns in response to your query (e.g. by typing 'search engine optimisation' into the search box) that haven't been paid for or sponsored by a company.

The benefit of search engine optimisation and ranking highly in the search engines is easy to see. Just think about your own searches - how often do you look beyond the first page of results, let alone beyond page number 3. If you're like us, then not very often at all. This means that if you don't rank within the top 10-20 listings within the search engines, then it is highly unlikely that your customers will find you.

To find out more about what search engine optimisation involves, read our Search Engine Optimisation Guide or to find out about how freedom24 can help your business grow, visit our Search Engine Optimisation page.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising

When search engines return results to your queries, they return two sets of results on the same page. One set is the 'natural' results, which is where search engine optimisation comes in. The other set are sponsored listings which companies have paid for. Within Google, the natural results are the listings on the left and the sponsored listings are at the very top and on the right under the title 'Sponsored Links'.

Pay-per-click advertising is the process of placing your advert within these Sponsored Link sections. Each time someone clicks on your advert, you pay a certain amount. This amount depends on where you want to be placed within the results and how competitive the keyword is - the more companies advertising on a keyword, the more you will have to pay per click to be higher in the listings.

The benefit of pay-per-click advertising is that you can immediately achieve first-page listings in the search engines, where as search engine optimisation can take weeks or months in some cases. The keywords you bid for and the amount you bid will depend on your budget - you need to strike the right balance to ensure you make the very most of your money. An added benefit of pay-per-click advertising is the ability to set budget limits so that you never spend more than you want to - once you have reached your budget limit, your adverts will stop showing.

Many businesses are utilising this highly powerful search engine marketing technique as it can, when used properly, generate really high returns on your investment. Depending on your business, it really is one of the most cost-effective marketing tools available.

To find out about how freedom24 can use pay-per-click advertising to help your business grow, visit our Pay-Per-Click Advertising page.

Conclusion

As more and more businesses and customers move online, search engine marketing is now an essential ingredient in a successful marketing plan. Whether you decide to do it in-house, or use a company such as freedom24, it really is a must-do technique in today's digital world. Contact us now to find out how we can help your business make the very most of search engine marketing.

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