What is search engine marketing? Search engine marketing is the future of advertising and is becoming an ever grow part of the marketing strategy for companies of all sizes. When search engine marketing is mentioned, pay per click advertising and search engine optimization come to mind. It can now be said that social media plays a crucial role in search marketing as well. Let’s start by taking a look at these three forms of marketing.

What is Pay Per Click Advertising?

Pay per click marketing can be simply defined as a form of paid advertising that displays text and image ads when select keywords are searched. The price paid by the advertiser for each click on an ad is determined by the competition level of the keyword. In order to optimize a pay per click campaign, one must pair proper keywords with related landing pages. Pay per click ads are displayed above, to the right of, and below the organic search results.  If you want to learn more about pay per click, check out our recent article: What is Pay Per Click.

What Is Search Engine Optimization?

Search engine optimization in the name given to the actions taken to improve the organic rankings for said site. The two primary categories of SEO are on page and off page SEO. On page SEO consists of optimizing items such as page speed, navigation, page content and titles, and image alt tags. Off page SEO is the method of building links back to a website in order to increase the trust and authority of a webpage to increase keyword rankings. Prior to the most recent algorithm updates made by Google, using your keyword as the anchor text was the primary method of gaining rankings. Now using branded anchor text and a much lower concentration of exact match anchor text is preferred. Search engine optimization has been around since 1995 and has evolved tremendously since its’ inception.

How Does Social Media Impact Search Marketing?

The most recent update made by Google is supposed to now consider social factors when determining the rankings of your website. While this is only a small consideration at the moment, indicators suggest that social media will continue to grow in importance to SEO over coming years. Google Author Rank is one example of how social signals may affect rankings. The second method of using social for search marketing is less direct. Since social sites have high PR, it has been discovered that you can often rank low competition keywords quickly by creating posts just for social sites such as Google +.  In addition, advances such as Facebook Graph Search are turning social sites into readily searchable pages, and this will most certainly affect the search results in Bing once a full implementation has happened.

Is SEO Better Than PPC Advertising?    

PPC vs. SEO has been a debated topic for the past several years. Both methods of advertising have their pros and cons. The best way to decide whether you need one or both of these services is to consult an expert in the field of search engine marketing. PPC is known for its ability to instantly drive traffic to a website while SEO is more of the marathon runner. It takes longer to rank but you do not have to pay per click which can save a lot of money on high traffic search terms.

Why Use Search Engine Marketing?

Search engine marketing is also known as inbound marketing. Inbound marketing is one of the most cost effective and highest converting forms of marketing available today. Recent studies have indicated that 93% of internet experiences start with a search engine. Local searches make up the majority of searches, so even if you only service one area, search engine marketing can put you in front of the right people. The thing that makes search engine marketing truly unique though is that it is one of the only forms of advertising that allows you to only pay to advertise to consumers who are already searching for your company. Other forms of marketing may advertise your product to consumers who may never need what you are offering, which is why inbound marketing has a 14% conversion rate as compared to the 2% average of other forms of marketing.

Is Content Marketing Search Marketing?

If you have read more than a few words related to online marketing, you have no doubt heard “content marketing”. The act of content marketing is a bit of a gray area. Prior to the adoption of content marketing by SEO providers, it was used as a means of generating referral traffic and still is to some extent today. Article submission sites used to provide a great deal of SEO value and could boost search engine rankings. At that time, the content was used as part of a search engine marketing strategy. Once SEO value was stripped from article directories, the people who continue to use this method are content marketers looking for referral traffic, so the articles in that sense are not part of search engine marketing. Either way, content marketing is here to stay.

Search engine marketing is hands down the best method that can be used to advertise a website. Inbound marketing will allow you to sit back and relax while the leads come to you and depending on your product or service, search marketing can help you earn an income on autopilot. Getting started in search marketing can be a very trick process. Sometimes just deciding which method to use can be a source of frustration. If you find yourself struggling to get started, contact us today to learn about our 15 day free trial. As we move into the future, search marketing is going to play an ever more important role in the success of small and large business owners alike. If you are not using search engine marketing yet, you are behind the curve, contact us today to get started.