Search Marketing is an important element in digital marketing as it ensures that potential clients can find the firm’s website and social media platforms by encouraging click through when the user types a specific keyword phrase. Search marketing divides into two distinct categories;

1. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) – buying traffic through paid search listings and usually involves pay per click (PPC) which are advertisements charged by the number of clicks arising from the listing.
2. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) – earning traffic through unpaid activities in the natural or organic listings by ensuring your virtual presence is set up to maximise the search engines’ algorithm (i.e. Google’s algorithm in 99% of cases).

The fact that SEO is natural in that the users’ specific search input generates the listing (due to relevancy) means that it is more powerful than paid listings that appear as advertising to the user. Consequently SEO should be exhausted before engaging in paid placements or sponsored links because pay per click (PPC) is competitive and cost per click (CPC) inflation can lead to higher costs than other media. If natural SEO is possible then it will almost always deliver a lower CPC.

The following activities will naturally enhance the visibility of a web site on search engines;

1. Extensive keyword research
2. Page title and META description tag development
3. Page headline and sub-headline development
4. URL / link title tag development
5. Picture Alt Tag development
6. Google sitemap and web directory submission
7. On-page content development
8. W3C Analysis
9. Website navigation review
10. Website architecture review
11. Benchmarking
12. Reputation management
13. Strategic link-building strategies
14. Custom SEO and analytical website reports

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

Google AdWords is by far the most important paid search platform, followed by Bing Ads. Pay per click (PPC) is a channel that ensures that your web pages can be easily found by people that are actively searching for your brand. Paid search advertisements appear at the top of a search engine, and in some cases along the right-hand side. The main benefit is that PPC allows you to target your most valuable audience since they are seeking you out as opposed to channels where you reach out to them.

Matching your advertisements’ text, offer, and landing page content to the keyword that you are bidding on is important. If what is searched for and what is offered is disjointed then you’ll be paying for clicks that don’t bring any value. This will also indicate to the search engine that your advertisement is low quality, and as a result, you’ll be forced to pay more to have you’re advertisements seen in the future.

Ensure to include your brand name, as well as those of your competitors when selecting keywords to bid on because appearing beside them will ensure that buyers who are only familiar with your competitors will discover you. It may seem strange to bid on your own name, but when a buyer searches for your name or term, you don’t want your competitors’ listing appearing above your own.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is important to ensure that potential clients can find the firm’s website and social media platforms by encouraging click through when the user types a specific keyword phrase into Google. However natural SEO is not as simple as in the past where it followed familiar patterns and as long as you used the right keyword, the right number of times on a page then you would rank and as long as you did that more than your competitors then you would outrank them.

Nowadays keywords are just one piece of the SEO puzzle and to really do well in SEO we need to understand context and intent. The Google algorithm now considers meaning and understands context such as where the searcher is and their online history and interests. Therefore we need to rethink about SEO in terms of an ecosystem and while all these tools help us to look at part of this ecosystem, the aim should be about understanding the whole of the ecosystem.

Big data is changing search marketing as “90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone” (ScienceDaily 2013). And all this extra information comes at a cost which is that you can spend huge amount of time trying to use multiple platforms to maximise all the information and you can spend too much time analysing data instead of developing and executing direct marketing campaigns. The solution for big data is to use the technology to manage and analysis this data. The aim is that you get a picture of what happens before people visit your website as well what happens when they are on your site i.e. the whole ecosystem.

A website has an ecosystem with regard to links, content and the thousands of search terms that your site could show up for. In order to get this picture of the whole ecosystem, you should consider everything - not just the links, or the design, or the user journey, or the presentation, or the text on the page. So how do you pull all these data points together and analyse them?

1. It involves looking at the structure of the website, at the URL structure.
2. How many words do you have per page and what do these words mean?
3. What is the relevance of the website in terms of the people who are searching for your business?
4. How streamlined is the layout of the website and does the users journey flow seamlessly.
5. Is it mobile friendly, does it look good on a desktop as well as mobile?
6. fast is the website and are the technical factors up to date?

Also there is other data to consider such as competitors. Every time a website shows up in search results means that it has competition – not just rival companies in your sector but others such as news organisation, Wikipedia and so on… basically anybody who is occupying your space in search results is a competitor. So in order to analysis this ecosystem there is a need to have multiple data points and to aggregate the data as it is this collection of information that allows us to gain the required insights.

For example if you are seeing a traffic spike for your website, it could be because there is an increase in visibility due to a particular keyword, seasonality or one of your competitors has disappeared from the rankings. And because of all these possibilities there is no way to work out why things are happening without multiple data points such as population statistics, impressions, traffic, sales, footfall, seasonality, weather, customer data, previous year data, benchmarking and so on. The overall aim is to have the data from these multiple data points in one place i.e. the firm's database.

Sophisticated SEO tools (Google Search Console, Moz Pro Tools, Screaming Frog SEO etc.) allow us to analysis back links, competitive works and choices as well as analysing what people are searching for, writing about and sharing. The net result is that these tools have given us more insight into our traffic and our user journey. The combination of these tools and an explosion in data has allowed us to make more informed decisions on such things as the website design process based on user behaviour.