What is Search Engine Marketing?

by Armen Mardirousi

Internet marketing, also known as search engine marketing (SEM), is first and foremost a part of a business’s marketing efforts that is aimed at increasing the traffic (number of visitors) to the business’s website from search engines. SEM is also plays an essential role in conversion (the percentage of visitors who become buyers). The first is achieved by increasing the site’s search engine visibility, i.e. the position of the site’s pages in the search engine results for certain keywords typed in the search box to obtain these results. For instance, if someone wants to find and buy a digital camera, they will go to a search engine such as Google and type “digital camera” in the search box. Google will list, in this case, 155 million results (these are real figures extracted while preparing this article). And if you sell digital cameras or offer any services related to them, your site may be listed among these 155,000,000 results. And here, everything depends on how deep your site is listed in these results. If you are on the first or second page of the search results, it’s more likely that such visibility will bring you many visitors and customers from Google. If, on the other hand, you are the 542nd result, it’s unlikely that anyone will come to you from Google at all.

So what can you do?
Search engine marketing comprises of two methods to increase your search engine visibility, traffic and conversion. One of them is improving your organic search engine rankings; the second is paid listing and advertising.

Organic rankings are what you get for ‘free’. That is, you create Web copy and publish it, then after a certain period of time a search engine robot finds it. The robot then reads the sites content and puts it into the search engine’s index. Now your site might be found by this search engine when people query for some words contained within your pages. Obtained this way, your positions in the result list are called your “organic search engine rankings.”

Paid listings are different: you pay the search engine and it guarantees the inclusion of your site in the index. Moreover, many search engines offer advanced pay-for-performance programs, such as showing your site/ad in the search results for the keywords of your choice. These are the so-called “sponsored” results. Most commonly, you will have to pay a specific rate for each visitor that comes to your site by clicking on your “sponsored” link. This is known as pay-per-click or PPC.

The aim of SEM is to find a proper balance between organic and paid listings. This goal is broken down into several more specific aims in both directions:
For organic listings:

Improve traffic quantity: get as much traffic as possible;
Improve traffic quality: get high rankings for exactly those keywords that bring you visitors with the best conversion rate.

For paid listings:

Decrease expenditures by switching off advertising for underperforming keywords;
Improve conversion by choosing the right keywords to target (as well as the right search engines themselves).

How it’s done.
The two main methods used for achieving the goals of search engine marketing are Search Engine Optimization for organic listings and Web Analytics for both organic and paid listings.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is about, among other things, making changes to the HTML code of the site’s pages and structuring the site in such a way that when a search engine robot reads the site, it can understand that the pages have valuable content related to the keywords, thus ranking them high. SEO also includes ways to improve your link popularity – the number and quality of links from other high-ranked, related pages to your site. This step is important because most search engines consider your link popularity a vital ranking factor. Therefore it is imperative that you select a well-qualified and experienced search engine optimizer to ensure proper optimization of your site.

Web Analytics is about getting, analyzing and using the information about your visitors, their details, their behavior while on your site, the ways they have found your site, the efficiency of referrers and advertising, conversion rates, and, together with all that, eCommerce information.

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