What is Search Marketing

What is Search Marketing

Search Marketing is a form of digital marketing that attempts to capitalize on the first step of most Internet users, searching for information on a major search engine such as Google or Yahoo! Search.

Search Marketing techniques typically fall into two main buckets:

A. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) or Paid Search

• SEM is considered online advertising and requires an interactive media buy that may include keyword buying, pay-per-click and paid inclusion.

B. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or Natural Search Optimization

• Focuses on the techniques required to help improve the ranking of your website in the natural search engine results.

• Natural Search Optimization requires that you optimize all of your web content to increase the likelihood that your website will be found within the Natural Search results.

• Natural Search results are the links that appear in the central non-sponsored section of a search engine results page.

• They are determined by spiders or web crawlers algorithmically calculating the accuracy and probability that the term you are searching for is within the results

Why is Search an important part of marketing communications

Traffic: The closer you are to the top of the search results page, the more traffic your site will receive

Credibility people perceive natural links as being more credible because they know the company did not pay for the link placement

People are 6x more likely to click on a natural than a paid ranking.

80% of people won’t click to second page of rankings. (They’re more likely to type in a new keyword.)

Efficiency - Paid search spend continued to hold strong in Q3 2008 despite the economic climate, Search Ignite president Roger Barnette said in a statement. The strength of this ad market in today’s economy suggests that paid search continues to be a highly profitable and efficient digital marketing channel for brands.

Competitors Your competition has been working on SEO for years now.

Info source People are getting their news directly from Yahoo/Google search engines, as well as traditional means.

Source : Google