Search engine marketing is a marketing tool that optimizes your website and increases your website’s visibility in search engine results pages through paid as well as organic efforts. Did you ever wonder why when you type “sunglasses” into Google Ray-Ban’s website comes up first in the results before, let’s say, Nordstorm? That’s search engine marketing. There are a few ways to utilize search engine marketing.
Search Engine Marketing involves things such as Search Engine Optimization (SEO), paid listings, keywords, and analysis.
First things first, what is the difference between Search Engine Marketing and Search Engine Optimization? The short answer is that Search Engine Marketing helps you target users through paid advertisements, while Search Engine Optimization targets users organically (free of advertising costs) to send traffic to your website. SEO is a subset of Search Engine Marketing, and is an important part of SEM in order to provide maximum traffic to your site.
Search Engine Marketing is important because it targets users when they are purposefully looking for a product or solution. Unlike other types of marketing that are more intrusive, interrupting them to put a product in front of their eyes, search engine marketing is there when a consumer is consciously looking for a brand or company.
Keywords play a big part in search engine marketing. Embedding keywords in your website and throughout the pages will ensure it is displayed in search engine results. You’ll want to include as many keywords as possible, and be specific. You never know what your potential customer will type into Google when looking for a product or service, and you want to be there when they hit search. If you aren’t your competitor will be. A yoga studio in Pennsylvania named their business specifically to show up in search engine results. Often, a consumer will type “yoga near me” into Google to find yoga studios in close proximity. The name of their yoga studio? Nearme Yoga.
You’ll want to be sure you choose the right keywords so you reach your targeted audience. Research to find the most relevant and popular keywords being used in your market and for our product.
Aside from keywords, you’ll want to include web analytic tools in your website to track the success of your website and its keywords in search engine results. These include HTML codes that can be embedded into each page of your website in order to provide tracking.
You can even pay for search engine inclusion. These types of postings are known as sponsored listings and are provided by search engines companies to be included in regular search engine results as well as separate results identified as an advertising area.