The main methods used for achieving the goals of Search marketing are Search Engine Optimisation (for organic listings), Bid Management (for paid listings) and Web Analytics (for both types of listings).
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
SEO is about changing the HTML code of your pages and the structure of your site in such a way that when an SE robot reads the site, it can understand that the pages have valuable content related to your keywords, and then rank them high. SEO also tells about ways to increase your link popularity – the number of links from other high-ranked pages to your site. This is important because most search engines consider your link popularity a vital ranking factor.
Bid Management (BM)
BM is about controlling bids, i.e. the amount of money you spend maintaining your visibility in the sponsored listings. Usually you try to detect the best converting keywords and keyword groups, in order to increase bids on them; as well as decrease or take off bids on keywords that don’t break even. Attention also should be paid to leveraging your paid and organic listings, so to spend less on paid advertising campaigns when you get enough traffic from natural results, and invest in paid advertising when an algorithm changes or strong competitors force you out from the top positions in the organic listings.
Web Analytics (WA)
WA is about getting, analysing and using the information about your visitors, their details, their behavior 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.
So here’s what you should remember from this post:
- Search Marketing, or Search Engine Marketing, or SEM, is the aggregate of efforts aiming at increasing your search engine visibility.
- SEM deals with your organic and paid listings on the search engines.
- SEM includes and uses the techniques of Search Engine Optimisation, Bid Management and Web Analytics.
