Traffic Building – Search Engine Marketing


Without any doubt, Search Engine Marketing is the most important digital marketing channel – especially for customers acquisition.

Clients turn to search engines when seeking products, services, information – they search online for you and your products/services. Do you get why it is so crucial to be visible in search engines results?
Here are the 2 main techniques used In Search Engine Marketing:
  1. SEO – search engine optimization
  2. PPC – Pay Per Click

SEO

The aim here is to achieve the highest possible position or ranking in the natural/organic listings. So what do you do to optimize your website position in different search engines?

First of all, you must understand how these results are produced. Search technology involves 3 main processes:

Crawling: identifying relevant pages for indexing; it’s performed by robots, also known as spiders
Indexing: this is a lookup table created to unable search engine to find the most relevant pages in response to searcher query 
Ranking: a lookup is not sorted in terms of relevance. The results will be displayed based on many ranking factors. We will explain in details in a moment
Query request and results serving: through the searchers IP, the location is assessed and the query is ‘passed’ to a relevant data centre. This allows for most accurate search results for the particular searcher.

Ranking Factors:

Site submission. Every new and not submitted site, should be submitted. This will ‘inform’ search engines that your site exist.
Keywords analysis. The keyword phrase relevance is the key to successful SEO. How should you analyse and set you keyword phrases?
Step 1: Identify the popularity of search term, its relevance and competitors. We recommend using free Google tools: https://adwords.google.com
Step 2: Assess how the company is performing for these keywords. Use tracking tools and tags to do so.
Step 3: Identify gaps. Recognise the biggest potential for improvement.
Step 4: Set goals and select keywords you will be targeting. These are the keyword phrases you want to be visible for.


How can I improve search engine ranking?

It’s not that easy, but fortunately there are some common factors which have big influence on search engine rankings. In a very simplistic way, there are 3 very important factors which can be managed easily:

1) On-page optimization
2) External Linking
3) Internal link-structures

On page optimization

As Google states: ‘ Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears  on a page and examines all aspects of the page’s content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it’s a good match for your query’. As you can see, the number of times you use keywords on the page isn't enough! Some of other factors: 
  • Frequency
  • Occurrence in heading <h1> <h2>
  • Occurrence in anchor text of hyperlinks
  • Markup, eg. Bold
  • Density
  • Alternative image text
  • Document meta data (title, meta tag, keywords meta tag)

External linking

The number and quality of the links determine your site rankings. Your site should deliver valuable content. If you only offer services, you can always add a few pages such as ‘Useful Resources’. Your visitors will share and recommend the website to others.
Another option to build quality external links is by identifying potential partner sites. Useful resources: Directories of links, Niche online-only media, Press Release distribution sites, Social Networks.
TIP: You can search on google:
<keyword phrase> + directory
<keyword phrase> + ‘Add URL’
<keyword phrase> + ’Links’
<keyword phrase> + ‘where to buy’ etc.
Today the quality of the links is even more important than number of them.

Internal link structures

The most important thing to do is to use keyword phrases within the anchor text of hyperlink (www.yourwebsite.com/searchenginemarketing as opposed to www.yourwebsite.com/hs749f). You may also consider the internal links to pages you want to rank well and be found by the visitors.

PAID PER CLICK

It is a similar technique to conventional advertising. The ad is displayed when the user searches for the specific keyword phrase.  There are a few advertising programmes: Google Adwords, Yeahoo Search Marketing, Microsoft adCenter, MIVA.

The main characteristics and advantages of the PPC are:

  • The advertiser does not pay for displaying the ad. Cost only occurs when the ad is clicked on.
  • The PPC advertising is highly targeted based on the campaign settings and keywords.  
  • The PPC have good tracking system
  • Much simpler than SEO
  • PPC are posted within a few days, while the SEO takes weeks if not months

Some disadvantages:

  • Competition and expensive
  • Not always cost effective
  • Knowledge required setting up correctly and analysis. It is quickly changing so the person needs to keep up to date with these changes.
  • Managing campaigns is time consuming – require checks

Effective paid search ad checklist:

  • ü  Relevant search terms and keywords in headline and body
  • ü  Specific offer
  • ü  Specific benefits listed: free delivery etc.
  • ü  What is unique about your offer
  • ü  Including numbers
  • ü  Use of CAPS
  • ü  Use of characters: !,?, & …
  • ü  Distinctive words
  • ü  Squeeze in a call to action
  • ü  The web address visible

Summarizing, it is important to have an employee who is knowledgeable and trained to optimize your website. Alternatively, you can outsource the search engine optimization.