The worldwide web is a big old place, and everyone is fighting to be number one on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). It’s not easy, even if you have an incredible product, a beautiful website and great employees and skills. Search Engine Marketing (SEM), also known as Online Marketing or Digital Marketing, covers the various methods of increasing a website’s visibility in SERPs, increasing awareness around your brand, increasing traffic into your site and hopefully resulting in more leads and sales for your company. Techniques vary from business to business but generally include:
- Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
- Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising or Paid Search
- Monitoring, Auditing and Analytics
Companies like Ikroh specialise in these complicated fields, helping to develop a unique strategy for your particular company to drive prospective customers to your site. Research has shown that the top 30 search results get 90% of search traffic, and the top 10 results receive a staggering 80% more traffic than the following 11-30.
Search Engine Optimisation is also known as Natural or Organic Search – using well written SEO copy to increase familiarity within search engines, raising your website’s ranking on result pages. Keywords are important, but not the be-all-and-end-all of SEO, as peppering your articles and blog posts with mindless repetition of keywords is not only unappealing to read, but excessive overuse will be penalised by search engines. (Make sure your SEO is ethical, using white hat avatars, or your website could be dismissed, dropping through the rankings, or even banned.) Content can also be distributed through Social Media Marketing, shared via blogs and social media platforms such as Facebook or Twitter, and bookmarking sites such as Digg or Del.ic.io.us. Search engines will recognise an increase in coverage or links to your site, and raise your ranking appropriately. Though results are generally slower building than other techniques such as PPC, SEO is cheaper and the overall outcome will be stronger with regular monitoring and upkeep.
Pay Per Click campaigns are comprised of paying for the top positions in search page results by bidding for selected keywords associated with your product or service. This is a more expensive solution, but if implemented well can be quick and efficient at getting your website noticed and ensuring exposure to your customers.
Both types of SEM require specialist knowledge and continual monitoring and auditing to ensure that your site not only gets to the highest ranking it possibly can, but stays there! SEO companies can also analyse your site, tracking statistics to find out whether it is performing at its best, where it loses customers, where it succeeds in making conversions and if it is usable and engaging.
There are other avenues to pursue in Online Marketing, which can go hand in hand with your SEO or PPC campaign and increase your marketing success further, such as Email Marketing, Blog Marketing and Social Media Marketing. A professional SEO company like Ikroh will be able to tailor the most effective marketing plan for your business and get the results you are after.
