Search Engine Marketing – Your Key to Search Engine Visibility
A major way of grabbing attention is to engage in marketing communications and advertising so that the people become aware of what it’s that you provide. Whenever a new method of marketing pops up, people jump on the bandwagon, hoping to get a lead on their competitors and satisfy the needs and desires of the customers first.
The number of people who have turned to using the Internet for their marketing purposes has been on the rise since the dot-com bubble and the rapid growth of powerful search engines such as Google. While previously the method of outbound marketing was the tried and tested way of getting customers to notice your products or services, it was not always a hundred percent reliable.
The methods of cold calling, putting in advertisements in the media and sending direct mail to potential customers were no guarantee of success, as there was no way to accurately quantify whether or not the customers didn’t like what you were offering, or had simply missed the advertisement in the newspaper or hung up the call after realizing it was just a sales pitch.
SEO and PPC for Online Visibility
By turning to search engine visibility techniques such as SEO (search engine optimization) and PPC (pay-per-click), the ball is now the court of the customers. They are the ones who choose which websites they want to visit by searching keywords and choosing the most relevant sites.
By being ranked in search engine results for keywords potential customers are searching through search engine marketing, a business can help drive traffic to their website and increase their customer base. The specialty of search engine marketing (SEM) is that it can include both PPC and SEO efforts. So how is SEM different from these two?
Like SEO and PPC, the goal of SEM is to get higher search engine visibility or search rankings. However, while SEO does this for free, and PPC is payment per the number of times someone clicks on your ad, SEM combines both tactics to reach potential customers organically and by paying for advertising space at the top of the search results page.
SEM provides a multitude of benefits for a business. Key among them: it generates traffic to your website for keywords that are most relevant to your customers, it’s cost effective, and you can use free tools available online such as Google Analytics to see how much traffic is coming to your site and where it’s coming from.
However, people can be skeptical of SEM, as SEM basically amounts to paying to be the first results that people see when they search for something along with organic results. There is no way of assuring users whether the website at the top of paid advertisements is actually offering you the best results for your search.
Regardless of how you might feel about SEM, it can be said that SEM services are on the rise. They are popular for businesses to generate traffic and improve their brand awareness. There are many search engine marketing firms which will help you. They determine which SEM marketing strategy will work best for you.