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Search Engine Marketing

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) generally covers two areas: Paid Search Advertising and Organic Search Optimization.

Google Pay-Per-Click (PPC) is the most popular or well known method of advertising your products and services on the Internet. Even though PPC is one of the best forms of advertising, like all advertising, your exposure stops when your budget runs out.

With organic search, once you achieve a page one Google ranking you will begin to receive up to 75% more visitors to your website than with traditional Google PPC. So how does one go about achieving these often elusive rankings? Once you know the secret to obtaining search engine visibility, you will be motivated to participate in the process of developing your online brand.

Search Engine Visibility

Search engine visibility means getting your company’s name and brand to appear on search engine results pages for many keywords that are related to your product or service. So how does one go about achieving this? Why do people use search engines today?

Analysing the Enviro and MarketingSherpa B2B Report 2009 identified that only 10% of people go to a search engine like Google, type in a keyword and then click through to a Web page and buy a product, all on the same day.

The rest of us go to the Internet to get information and do research on the product or service we are interested in.

What Information Do We Look For?

The study revealed that people who use search engines are looking for the following information in order of importance:

• Easily found prices
• Download info
• Product info
• Product comparisons
• Your company’s approach to business
• Technical papers
• Knowledge base
• General information about your product
• White papers
• Case studies
• Multimedia like video on your product
• Information about your company
• Webinars
• Podcasts

From this list it is easy to see what the “secret” is.

It is “CONTENT”. I am sure you’ve all heard of the phrase “content is king”. Well since the inception of the Internet, content is what we have all been looking for. It has stood the test of time, while many of us try to keep up with Google’s ever changing algorithms.

Once we find out that content is all we need to achieve search engine visibility, we see many business owners get excited about participating in their website marketing with great results.

The best way to get a return on your website investment is to create an asset out of your website. This is achieved by adding content to your website on a regular basis. This strategy is called “Content Marketing”. By adding content pages you increase your chances of ranking for “long tail” keyword phrases. These are phrases of 3 or more words that often result in highly focused and targeted search results.