Search Marketing 101

One Minute Education- What is Search Marketing?

Search Engine Marketing or SEM is a form of Internet marketing that utilizes placement in the search engines (such as Yahoo!, Google, MSN, etc.) to expose your company to prospective clients and customers.

Search Engine Marketing falls into two main categories:

     1. PPC (Pay Per Click) or CPC (Cost Per Cick).

     2. Search Engine Optimization, often referred to as SEO. This is also called 
         Organic Search and/or Natural Search.

     3. Social Media Optimization (SMO), or Social Media Marketing (SMM)



SEO & PPC


Both SEO and PPC use search engines to drive traffic to your wite, but here’s how they differ:

  • Pay Per Click (PPC) involves bidding on strategically selected keywords so that your company gets prominent placement on search engine results’ pages. Each time a user clicks on your ad, they are taken to the specific page you want to direct them to. You pay money (usually somewhere between ten to 45 cents – though sometimes more) for each click.

  • Organic/Natural SEO involves optimizing your web site so search engines can find it, crawl through it, and index it. We “optimize” your site by knowing how many words your content needs to include, by using selected keywords a certain number of times within the content, by coding and tagging, and by strategic linking in order to achieve good rankings. The trick to good organic placement is selecting keyword phrases that target the words that buyers actually type in to find you. SEO is not based on secrets; it’s based on real science and empirical data. Although SEO costs money initially, over time your investment will result in FREE listings that occur naturally and organically.

Many users do not know that there is a difference between natural and paid listings. But now, you do.

It is the strategic combination of these two elements that make for Page One and Top Ten rankings.


Social Media Marketing       

Social Media Marketing involves setting up and optimizing free online platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, MySpace and many others. These social platforms allow you to take advantage of the millions of consumers who are active on these portals and push them to your website. In addition, social media sites act as “mini websites” that are easy to optimize and allow you to dominate the first page of search results under your best keywords. 

Many business owners are skeptical of social media, thinking “It’s just something my teen does,” but by optimizing these sites you can get real leads from Facebook, Twitter, Blogging, etc. 


STRATEGY                                  

The goal with all Search Engine Marketing is for you to dominate your category in carefully selected areas. Because there is such fierce competition for major keywords, one of the most effective strategies is to uncover the keywords that buyers (rather than visitors) are actually using, and optimize placement for those terms — which are often different from the more obvious and more competitive terms. It is essential that your company discover the actual terms your customers use to search for your product or service. That’s why it is only after historical PPC research that it is possible to properly evaluate which keywords are best to use.

There are other components to search engine marketing, which you can learn about by clicking on this link, but SEO, PPC, and SMM (explained above) are the main approaches.

The Findability Group (formerly Lutze Consulting) employs a combination all search marketing elements to craft your internet marketing strategy and ensure that everything works together synergistically to produce optimal exposure for your website with the lowest possible investment.

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For more information about any of these categories or to see real-time data on your company’s current viability on the web, contact us today.