Search engine marketing combines search engine optimisation (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) search engine advertising to deliver highly targeted visitors to your digital content.
Search engine marketing ‘pulls’ potential customers, with a prequalified interest in your products and services, towards your digital content. Their interest is prequalified by the searches they perform. By using SEO, supplemented by PPC, to maintain prominent visibility in the search results of Google and other search engines, businesses have the opportunity to engage with a highly targeted and relevant audience.
PPC (Paid Search)
PPC search engine advertising, via services such as Google Adwords, is a flexible and very controlled method of achieving search engine visibility. Ad creatives are targeted to appear in response to searches for particular key phrases and are charged on a cost-per-click basis. In other words, a business only pays for the advertising that actually generates visitors.
SEO (Organic Search)
SEO is concerned with achieving prominence in ‘organic’ or ‘natural’ search engine results, which account for the lion’s share of search engine referred website visits. Unlike PPC, the search engines don’t charge for listings in organic results. Pages are ranked in descending order of their perceived relevance to the search performed and their value to the person searching. In very simplified terms, relevance is influenced by the richness of digital content, while the number and quality of links to that content from other relevant content determines a measure of value.
Integrated Search Engine Marketing
The mechanics of SEO and PPC are very different, but the way they prequalify visitors is the same. PPC campaigns have to be coordinated with SEO activity to minimise cannibalisation and maximise the benefit of shared intelligence. SEO and PPC also share a reliance on digital content for their success. For instance, if a visitor clicks-through to a page that delivers a poor experience, their first impression will be negative, they’ll be unlikely to convert into a customer and the search visibility will have been wasted. Search engine marketing, and SEO in particular, also has a direct and very important relationship with social media activity in terms of content and link strategies.
Recommended SEO Tools
For businesses that want to understand the effectiveness of their existing SEO activity and have the resources to manage it, Heartwood Digital highly recommends SEOmoz PRO, which provides weekly crawls and rank tracking, on-page SEO recommendations and competitive analysis, plus access to over 30 tools including Open Site Explorer.
