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Visibility to the clients and customers remains the key instrument for running a business successfully. As long as the market supported only physical, tangible setups, the way the enterprises snatch the customer’s attention was different.
However, with digitization, the traditional methods of marketing are now obsolete and a fresh set of ideas have replaced them already. One such move remains search marketing. Now, what is a search marketing strategy?
Before you strategize, you must have a clear idea of what you are dealing with. Many people think that search engine optimization and search marketing are the same things. In reality, the former is a part of the latter. Search marketing encompasses two ideas – SEO and PPC.
What Is A Search Marketing Strategy
Before digging deeper into the layers of search engine marketing, let’s understand how a common person conducts a search online for any product or service. Initially, the person looking for something generally types a few words in the search box of a search engine.
Professionals associated with online platforms call this phrase or word a keyword. After entering the keyword or search term, a page consisting of several links where the products and services matching the query could be found appears. This is called SERP or a search engine result page.
According to data, almost 30% of the users click on the first few links on SERPs. Therefore, securing the top position in any SERP is crucial for any business. Here comes the importance and application of search engine marketing and the strategies that could enhance your business’s visibility online.
Google Analytics remains one of the most reliable tools using which an enterprise can easily trace the difference in conversion rates after implementing a set of marketing strategies.
Wait! Are you thinking of how to find someone capable of understanding all these layers and devising strategies suitable for your business?
Don’t worry! Most reputed marketing agencies keep these solutions integrated into their digital marketing strategies. Before discussing anything else, let’s first understand the two pillars of search marketing, SEO and PPC, in more detail.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
The best part is – this is zero paid-ad marketing! When you search for a particular product or service online, you always come across several links on the SERP. Now, if you pay attention, you will find that the top few links always carry a mark of AD in a small yellow box just beneath the link in the leftmost corner.
This is an indication that the link above it is one of the paid Google Ads. All the rest that follow are organic search results. If you wish to improve your company’s organic search results, you need to improve the SEO efficiency of your webpage.
Google and many other search engines prepare an organic listing by combing through website text, documents, PDFs, and other content. Google also takes care of the data in your website’s Meta tags, and several other signals, like speed of the website, number of external links, and more.
Google always intends to provide the users with the best possible results. Therefore, if customers looking for certain products and services do not find your website up to their expectations or fail to click on your website in the first place, your website’s ranking deteriorates.
How To Increase The Chances Of Organic Listing On Google?
You need proper SEO strategies to augment your chances of getting a high rank on Google’s SERP. From including relevant keywords in your website’s content to creating innovative and unique videos, there can be many ways to make your site more SEO-friendly.
However, you should update the content regularly to keep it time-relevant as popular keywords also change over time. A perfect SEO strategy will help you attract more potential customers and the conversion rate will also go up over time. Your brand or company should also focus on social media presence which works as an additional source of SEO augmentation.
However, SEO strategies might take a while when it comes to tangible outcomes. Nevertheless, investing in SEO is a wise decision at any time as it is good for your business in the long run. Come on – ROI is not absent, it will just take a little longer. Try your patience and invest in SEO today.
PPC (Pay Per Click)
If you are the impatient kind and prefer witnessing results right after investing money, this option is for you. PPC is the paid marketing option of Google. However, the calculations are not simple.
To begin with, when a customer clicks on your link after your URL gets displayed on SERP, you pay a certain amount for that click. This is called CPC or cost per click.
Now, CPC may vary from one ad to another. Always remember that when someone clicks on your URL based on a search term, you immediately get into competition with your rival brand which is also vying for the customer. Here comes the idea of a Google Adwords auction.
A wide variety of parameters including quality score, keyword competitiveness, etc., determine the CPC you pay for any PPC ad.
Before using PPC ads, make sure to learn about how they work. Every wise investor would first like to know about the extent of risks and rewards associated with any investment before spending money. However, PPC ads, when applied the right way, provides the advertiser with fast, tangible results.
According to market experts, leaving the fortune of your business in the hands of either SEO or PPC alone is not a good choice.
Using both tools tactically to get the best results is what digital marketing experts find commendable. Therefore, make sure that your online marketing strategy includes both the pillars of SEM, or else, the edifice of success might find the foundation inadequate for sustained existence.
Importance Of Search Marketing
With all that has been discussed so far, it is likely that you are no longer looking for an answer to your initial question what is a search marketing strategy? Therefore, it is time to uncover why you need it. There remain several reasons for embracing SEM to keep your business ahead in this competitive environment. The followings are a few such aspects that make adopting SEM a wise idea for all businesses.
Enhanced Brand Awareness: When you consider search engine marketing for your website, you by default say yes to create more brand awareness. Effective SEM strategies organize everything starting from target keywords to website content more effectively.
As a result, the position of your URL on any search engine improves. Therefore, more people get to see your brand name on the top of their search result pages and remember your name. Therefore, the recall value of your brand enhances and brand awareness grows.
Better Visibility: Effective SEM optimizes your organic search results. This means that when a customer types a keyword in the search box, the result pages displayed contain your brand’s link in the top few positions.
While customers seldom take the pain of scrolling down to the bottom of the page, they never miss out on the top few results that appear. Therefore, your website gets viewed multiple times. As a result, the visibility of your brand improves.
Location-Based Ads: With SEM, you have the opportunity to run local search-based ads. This means that advertisements can be created keeping the local customers and market in mind. A brand can run ads related to its global market as well as local markets at the same time.
Therefore, your business grows in a balanced manner. In short, your aspirations to penetrate the global markets do not come in the way of spreading your brand’s good name around your place. In simple words, going global mission does come at the cost of losing the local markets.
Catering To Target Audience: Regardless of your advertising budget your sole motto for investing in paid ads should remain to attract your customer’s attention.
As long as the advertisements are capable of fetching more interested customers to your website, they are useful and effective. Since SEM strategies remain based on parameters directly related to your target customer’s behavior and preference, the real-time outcomes often match the intended results.
Simple Management: Many people think that creating, running, and improvising advertising campaigns is a critical task. With Google Ads, everything becomes easier than ever. AD management becomes an effortless task when you say yes to Google ads.
Google Analytics is an excellent tool that helps you keep track of everything you do and everything you receive as a response. Therefore, planning future campaigns based on the current outcomes becomes hassle-free and less risky.
Improved Website Traffic: What ads are for? They are certainly there for making your URL visible to more people. What happens when your link gets better exposure? The traffic value of the website soars high. Therefore, SEM strategies, without any doubt, enhance website traffic volume.
However, this is not what you should be happy about as a business owner. Whether this traffic gets converted into customers or not should be the primary concern. Inflated traffic volume can be the beginning but not the end. Here comes the role of user experience.
If the customers visiting your portal find it slow, less informative, and less user-friendly, they will eventually get off it. Therefore, you need to first create a fast, easy-to-navigate, information-rich, content-filled website to keep that website crowd engaged and motivated until they make a purchase.
Measurable Outcomes: SEM strategies can change the outcomes through several channels. For instance, the website traffic may rise or the social media platform engagement may go up, and so on.
Whatever may remain the source of the effect, with Google Analytics, tracing the source and its contribution to sales becomes crystal clear. For a business owner, this indeed can be of paramount importance.
For example, if you notice that the lion’s share of the revenue benefits are coming from the ads played on social media platforms, you can consider investing more in it. In short, outcome analysis helps plan future strategies better by tapping the most revenue-generating sources separately.
Any professional digital marketing firm knows how to deal with SEM strategies where several market stimuli provide the impetus for business growth or contraction.
Things To Keep In Mind While Formulating Search Marketing Strategies
There is no doubt that appropriate SEM strategies have the power to take your business to its zenith. But, how to formulate an effective SEM strategy? While every digital marketing agency claims to know the trick, not succeed in its endeavors.
As a business owner, you have the most at stake. Therefore, it is always the best choice to know a little about what you should be looking for in a digital marketing firm. In simple words, you should know the aspects that an agency should be emphasizing while devising an SEM strategy for your firm.
To begin with, identification of the target audience remains the first thing. As a business owner you should know about your target audience base and so should your agency.
Secondly, you should be aware of the type of advertisements you consider the best for your products. For example, if you deal in baby products, you need to win the confidence of the parents. Therefore, the spirit of the advertisements should be in alignment with the sentiments and requirements of modern-day parents.
Thirdly, social media engagement remains another aspect that dictates your rise or fall in the market. Therefore, you and your agency should pay enough attention to your brand’s social media presence. Being present might not be adequate for a business to flourish. To use the platforms as a source of growth, your agency would need to run several ad campaigns and update them from time to time depending on the responses.
Last, but not the least, the content on your website should be catchy. Be it the video content or written ones, get everything rehashed and refreshed regularly to keep away monotony.
This means that even when an old customer visits your website, he/she should find it new and worth exploring. SEO-optimized websites always fetch more people to them, but, it is the content quality that keeps the prospective customers glued to the websites.
Who Should Opt For SEM
If you think that digital marketing tactics are only for big business, you need to think twice. While large-scale businesses need SEM for more than one reason, even the small ones need them for growth.
Financial vulnerabilities often keep small-scale businesses away from trying digital marketing strategies. However, now that you know that all kinds of SEM do not need heavy investments, you can surely try effective SEO tactics to keep your business growing and sustained. SEM strategies help a business grow.
The relevance and efficacy of these strategies do not remain correlated with the annual turnover of your business. If you are at level 0, these strategies can help you take your business to level 1.
If your business is at the top level already, these strategies will help it stay there. Therefore, regardless of the size of the business, invest in search engine marketing to grow even when the economic parameters turn a bit harsher.
Final Word
To summarize, the answer to what is a search marketing strategy is easy once you understand it. Search engine marketing is one of the most reliable and time-relevant solutions that every business should consider adopting.
A combination of paid and unpaid advertisements is always the best choice for taking your business to the next level. If you lack enough resources to implement both varieties, begin with the unpaid tools and when you start getting the ROI, introduce the paid ads as well.
In a nutshell, when all your rivals are armed against you, you cannot let the sword fall. Be competition ready and resort to the best of technology to stay afloat in even the most competitive market ecology.