Search Engine Marketing

Why search engine marketing is important

Reports have shown that 90% of purchases online originate from search engine listings and that 60% of searches in Google begin with the purpose of an online purchase in mind!

This means that almost all online sales start out with the shopper looking for information about their future purchase through a Search Engine. By the time they are searching for a specific brand, product or service the shopper has most likely already made up their mind on WHAT to buy and are now looking for WHERE to buy. Successful Search Engine Marketing (SEM) can put your website in the path of that shopper at the appropriate time in the buying cycle.

Do you want to be the source of information about a range of products or do you want to be the store of choice for those products? These important querstions need to be answered early in the Search Engine Marketing process.

The potential customer is making it easy for you - their search phrase is telling you exactly what they are looking for. All you need to do is make sure that your website is found by them in the Search Engine Results page!

Using SEM for your business

To date many companies have had a website developed and then sat back to wait for the sales to happen. Unfortunately this often results in a very, very long wait!

some other companies use Pay-per-click or PPC campaigns on Google and Yahoo in an attempt to attract buyers online and this strategy should indeed form part of alll successful online Search Marketing strategies. However, as the number of providers increases and the cost per click for those leads increases, this is increasingly becoming an expensive channel for sales leads! Besides PPC or CPC campaigns are often ignored by 'serious' searchers as they try to find the 'true source' of information.

Only by combining a well developed website, which is easy to use and which has been optimised for performance with effective PPC campaigns with other online marketing strategies will your online eCommerce venture succeed. You need to pay for some visitors but ideally you want the search engines to provide you with most of them for free!

And Organic or Natural listings at the top of the Search Engine Results pages are really the optimum way to attract new customers for your products. You are not paying for each visit and you know that the visitor actually searching for your service or product.

Pay Per Click Marketing

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) or 'cost per click' search engine marketing allows you to bid for positions on Search Engine Results pages. The term pay-per-click describes the fact that the advertiser only pays when a searcher clicks on their ad.

The amount bid by the advertiser, the quality of their ad, the relevance of the landing page (where the click will elad to) and the bids of competitors all impact on the actual cost charged to the advertiser by the Search Engine when the ad is clicked. In our experience a click in a very competitive vertical for a very common key term can cost almost 100 Euro. Of course for other terms in other, less competitive markets, a click might cost just a coupld of cent.