SEARCH IN MARKETING A BRIEF OVERVIEW..

SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING

Search is an integral part of truly integrated marketing campaigns that ties offline and online elements together, pushing consumers to engage with static media, or giving them the option of responding to offers or ideas promoted by them.

– Joe Mandese, editor-in-chief, MediaPost 

Search Engine Marketing is by far the most important ‘Lead Generation activity’ for any business with online presence and demands a lion’s share of an online marketer’s budget.

Search engines are considered the doorways to the internet for the websurfers.

Every day, over 5 billion searches are conducted over the net by the internet users to find what they want.. This is almost equal to the global population of human beings.

Almost every websurfer has a Search engine as their home page and use the search engines to go to their most visited sites. More than 90% of the internet population invariably use the search engine by using a Keyword or a key word group that best declares their search intent which could be to  search for an information, navigate to the page they require or to conduct  various transactions over the net leading to e-commerce or interact with others.

‘Search engine marketing, (SEM), is a form of Internet marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs) through the use of paid placement, contextual advertising, and paid inclusion.

The term "Search Engine Marketing" was proposed by Danny Sullivan in 2001[10] to cover the spectrum of activities involved in performing SEO, managing paid listings at the search engines, submitting sites to directories, and developing online marketing strategies for businesses, organizations, and individuals’…. Wikipedia October 2011.

The purpose of Search Marketing is to get the  landing page of the marketer to the top of the search result as shown on the SERPs ( Search engine result pages) for a given keyword. The aim is to get into the top half of the first result page that will result in highest chance of landing the resultant business from the web for a given purchase intent as reflected in the keyword associated with it.

Top of Search is equivalent to Top of Mind awareness of the marketer’s url on the web.

As more and more marketers try to get on top of the SERPs ahead of millions of their competitors for the same key word, the search engines try to maximize their revenue earning potential by monetizing a portion of the space on top of the top SERPs.

This has resulted in a huge business opportunity for the prominent search engines like Google andYahoo ( now planned to be merged with Bing).

The largest SEM vendors are Google through its AdWords program and  Yahoo!  through its Microsoft advertising adcentre program.

Google is now ranked as the 4^th most valued brand in the world after Cococola, IBM and Microsoft with a brand value of more than  US$55 Billion as per a Best Global Brands report published in October 2011by InterBrand , the leading authority on Brand valuations globally.

There are two prominent ways of conducting Search Marketing, both of which are centred around the concept of ‘Keywords’. They are,

a.       Paid Search Marketing or ‘Search Engine Advertising’- This is done by bidding for placement on the top spots of the SERPs through PayPer Click (PPC) campaigns like Google Adwords and Microsoft Advertisement Adcentre.

This is used extensively for short term results in getting traffic to the websites.

This is represented at the top of the SERP listed above under the head sponsored ads.

In the virtuous cycle of paid search, you need advertisers. The more advertisers you have, the more bids you have. The more bids you have, the more traffic you have. The more traffic you have, the more money you get per search.

– Gary Flake, director, Microsoft Live Labs 

b.       Organic Search Marketing or ‘Search Engine Optimisation’

aimed at improving the website’s ranking in natural search results. SEO

comprises of a set of activities starting from submission of the url by the webmasters to the Search engines and including a number of traffic generation activities  like on page optimization, off page optimization etc which will be described in the coming chapters.

Organic search comprises of over 70% of the searches done by the websurfers and the results of Organic surf are trusted more than those of the Paid search operation

While Paid search marketing is used for short term to get quick & measurable results, Search engine Optimisation  is  a slow process and is undertaken with long term goals in mind. SEO is also a dynamic activity as it has to keep place with the ever-changing rules of the Search engines to rank pages.