Consultancy for Search Engine Marketing

Being a consultant, I offer Search Engine Marketing services from Chennai. A brief explanation on Search Engine Marketing is given so that enterprising people can learn about SEM.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

Search engine marketing  (SEM) means the various tasks involved in the marketing of the website product specially for the "search engine visitors".

Since people are daily searching for information, product details, prices etc., the search engine itself is a market. The website must cater to each search engine market separately as they are different  in the way they process the searches, advertisements etc.

There are 2 aspects to SEM in this approach.
1. SE Advertising : This is to attract the search engine visitors to the website
2. SE Special process: The website has special pages and software to handle the prospects  with  different page, with different terms and workflow to guide them in completing a sale online.

1. SE Advertising

There are 2 methods to handle the advertising in search engine market namely

•  PPC Advertising (Pay-per-click Advertising)
•  Organic SEO (Non-paid search engine optimization )
  
   

a. Pay-per-click Advertising (PPC Advertising)

Paid advertisement campaigns are created and the amount is agreed to be paid for each click (a visitor clicks the advertisement to get into the website) is set along with a daily budget.

The advertisements have to be optimized to be shown regularly and on priority than the competitors. The campaigns can be paused temporarily on lean months and resumed.

PPC Advertising is more suitable to  websites where products or services can be ordered online and the company is willing to pay for receiving visitors.

The advantages are:

• multiple  advertisements can be created for keywords and the good performers can be found out
• best keywords that bring results can be found out
• the budget prevents over spending on advertising
• advertisements can target specific keywords, geographical location
• advertising can be expanded to Google network

The disadvantages are:

• Monthly allocation of funds  for advertising
• Competition for the same keywords which can increase the minimum amount for a click
• The conversion from visitors to orders may not be enough

 

b. Organic SEO (search engine optimization)

This is a natural (organic) method where web pages are designed and optimized to get higher search engine ranking to attract the searchers. This is suitable when information is sought by people. This is a long-term promotional method. This is not advertising. Hence we don't pay the search engine for this.

The keywords need to be selected that are more relevant and popular but sometimes it is better to use niche keywords. Web pages need to be designed and optimized based on the search engine rules.

The rank of the web page for the keyword must be regularly monitored and the web page needs to be optimized repeatedly to sustain the rank.

This works for information oriented web pages than product pages.

The advantages are:

• Web pages that provide good information can sustain their rank when present online for a longer time
• No fees charged by search engines to show the web page. Since the basic work of a search engine is to show relevant web pages that match the keywords.

 

The disadvantages are:

• Pages have to be designed for each set of keywords
• black hat methods( methods unapproved by search engines ) can be used by other people to temporarily push other website rankings
• the ranking rules or algorithms are regularly changed by the search engines which again compels the web pages to be redesigned or optimized
• No guarantee that people will search using the keywords selected and hence the entire SEO work may be wasted

Commercial websites can choose PPC Advertising for their product pages.
Websites that rely on information can try Organic SEO for long term presence.

A  website that wants to target search engine market, uses both approaches to secure a brand space as well as attract visitors.

Though many companies invest in advertising and get visitors, the website is generally  the same for both normal visitors
as well as search engine visitors. This is where, this SEM approach is unique.

2. SE Special process

The website receives qualified or interested prospects from the search engine advertising. Hence, these prospects deserve to be treated in a special way. The website must be designed and programmed to handle these prospects in a special way.

Just like you do in real stores, a person who comes in asking for a product, should be directly taken to the section, given the product, and billed quickly.

This is implemented online at the website.

The website senses and identifies the visitors as someone who has responded to the advertisements. So, special pages, special offers are shown to this prospect. The website tries to quickly encourage the prospect to order the product and if possible pay for it.

Most importantly, these prospects must also realize that they are treated specially compared to the casual visitors to the website.

Several aspects  have to be analyzed to undertake SEM.

• Find whether people are really searching for this product
• Find the keywords that searchers use
• Create web pages and advertisements relevant to the keywords
• Analyse website visitors demographics and onsite behaviour
• How well the workflow is performing for these prospects
• Analyse the conversion rate, i.e. the percentage of visitors who move to the order page and place the order