By Max StJohn
If you're looking online for a flight, a car, a new job – almost any product or service, in fact – how do you start looking?
If you're like most people, it will be via a search engine. Even if you know the company you'd prefer to buy from, chances are you'll 'Google' them rather than try and remember their website address.
Whether it’s medical advice, cheap flights or finding a new job, people are more likely to use a search engine than go directly to a website.
Why do you need a search engine marketing strategy?
For a start, search engines can refer large volumes of traffic to your website – but that's only half the story. Because visitors have searched for a particular word or phrase in order to find you, these people are already interested in what you’ve got to offer.
That means you've got a much higher chance of converting them to a sale.
How does search engine marketing work?
Search Marketing is about making your website visible to the people you want to target.
You’re competing against hundreds of thousands of other websites and your pages need to appear on that critical first page of results, or very few people will find you.
A Search Engine Marketing campaign makes sure you do. It can take two forms: Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising.
Search Engine Optimisation (seo)
SEO aims to move website pages up the 'natural' search rankings of engines like Google – where there is no cost when people click through.
When deciding where to place your pages in the search results rankings, search engines use a wide variety of criteria, from how relevant your content is the the 'search term' to the number and quality of websites linking to you.
Pay-per-click advertising (PPC)
PPC adverts appear on results pages where you are charged every time a user clicks through to your website.
Unlike traditional display advertising – online or offline – which offers you very little control over who sees your advert, regardless of the price you’ve paid, PPC gives you complete control, over both audience and budget.
PPC advertising allows you to choose the key terms that will trigger your adverts on Google’s paid search results.
These key terms can be as broad or precise as you like, you don’t pay until someone has decided to click on your advert and you decide how much you’re willing to pay when they do.
While a badly implemented PPC advertising campaign can prove expensive and ineffective, we can research, create, manage and monitor a paid-for campaign that will only direct the most qualified visitors to you site, making best use of your budget.
Check out Qube's Kick Start Search Marketing Package >
Call 01273 689672 or email us to talk about search engine marketing.
* Internet marketing research company Comscore