What is Search Engine Marketing - SEM

Let us see how search engines are used in marketing today.

Digital Marketing is associated with the 3 stages of,

• Marketing Communication
• Product/ Service Delivery
• Post Conversion Activities

There are many different tools used in these 3 stages regarding digital marketing. Search engine marketing is a very important tool used in marketing communication.

Search Engine Marketing involves all the activities involved in improving the visibility of a web site within search engines to improve the chance of attracting visitors to the web site. Any company would want their corporate web site to come at the top results for a search done regarding the particular category.

If you take the above screen shot of a google search done for "land sales" you can see 2 different types of results. One is at the very top in a light pink background & on to the right hand side corner. This is known as Paid Search Marketing. Where companies pay and purchase space for advertisements on search engines. Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC) is also a term used to identify this. This is where organizations will pay to bring their web sites to the top of the search results and will pay to google for each click they get.

The other search results are from organic growth. This falls under Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This means all the technical tasks that help search engines to read and index the web site information better & the marketing activities required enhance the authority & the relevance of the web site to make your website more highly placed in search engines.

Although many consider social media to be replacing search activities, the stats show that  the number of searches done per day on google is almost doubling every year.

Search has become a very important part of the buyer decision making process. Traditionally consumer get the exposure to the product at the market place and then buy and consume the product and give positive or negative feed back. This feed back has become the 1st impression for new customers even before coming to the market place. This is due to internet and telecommunication technologies. It is known as the Zero Moment of Truth. 

This refers to the online or offline searches a customer would do in today's environment before purchasing a product or a service. Looking at the stats we can see many people use different search sources. Friends, consumer groups, articles, etc. But among those, online search is at the very top. This is so important that many companies have taken steps to ensure that they pop up in the searches done by customers and the searches will show more positive content.

There are many ways to improve on search engine optimization. Most of these are based on how  search engines work. Let's look at a few general tips to improve your web site.

• Crawlability - Google has some system that crawls through your website and indexes the data in those pages. So in order to make your web site more relevant to the searches, you have to ensure that the crawlers have access to all the pages in your site. Also having simple meaningful URLs will help the crawlability further. You can find out how many pages the crawlers has access to by doing a search as "site:www.name of web site.com"

• Key Word Research - It is important to do a research to identify what are the key words actually used by customers in searching the products in your category. This will help you in making sure you optimize your page to the correct key words.

• Site Structure - It is important to have a proper site structure to make your web site more user friendly as well as to optimize the search quality. For example having a separate page for each category and brand and product will be more beneficial in terms of search engine optimization rather than having some drop down menus. Also it is important to have unique page names for each page in your web site.

• Content Building - It is very important to have a considerable amount of valued content in your web site because the content help build authority for your web site. This may include corporate info., blogs, customer reviews, integrated youtube channel, etc. You must use unique content rather than a copy from some where else, use the words found in the key word research more in your content to optimize the search more.

• Images & Videos - Having images & videos in the web site is believed to allow it to be included in search results more. But in including images and videos you have to ensure that the file names are appropriate to the content and that you provide alternate tags. Because search engines can not read images, the crawlers will view the image file name and include the web site on search results based on that image file name.

• Link Earning - Earning links is a very good way to optimize search. Here the quality of the links is what matters. Not the number of links. The best way to get good quality links is through developing the web site content. The links can be from blogs, related sites, articles, directories, social networks, etc.

These are just a few basics in search engine optimization and this content is based on the articles on digital marketing by Suranga Priyashantha, where you can visit www.SurangaPriyashantha.com for more information.

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