Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is the most precise and cost-effective route to driving pre-qualified customers to a web site. Users that have arrived at a site from a search engine have a high propensity to interact with that site.The number of people searching on the internet is still growing. According to comScore, there were 1,160 million searches in the UK in February 2006 compared to 893 million searches in February 2005 which represents 30% year-on-year growth in terms of the number of searches.
[E-consultancy Search Engine Marketing Buyer’s Guide 2006 & comScore, May 2006]
- Google dominates the UK search market, powering 77% of UK internet searches.
- MSN and Yahoo! each power just over 7% of UK internet searches.
- Ask.com has 5% market share.
[Hitwise, June, 2006]
Natural Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
SEO can generate the highest return on investment in online marketing.
SEO is the process of optimising a web site so that it is ranked as highly as possible in the natural listings of a search results page. Search engines send out ‘spiders’ to score web pages based on content; this is stored in an index. When a user conducts a search, the engine matches that term against the index and displays the listing in accordance with its score.
- Relevancy: search engine algorithms are designed to prioritise natural search results based on relevance to a user search. As a result, traffic from natural listings tends to be of a higher quality.
- Longevity: once a site is correctly indexed and optimised, the listings are there ‘permanently’. Natural SEO therefore provides long-term exposure of your web offering. Furthermore, unlike PPC, SEO listings are not budget-dependent and therefore do not expire when budget is unavailable.
- Self-perpetuating: a correctly optimised site structure will facilitate ongoing indexing of existing and new pages in your site over the long-term.
- Cost-efficiency: SEO is the most cost-effective and highest returning form of online marketing.
Pay Per Click (PPC)
Pay Per Click - or Paid Search - is where the advertiser pays to appear within the major search engines under targeted search terms. The payment model is Cost Per Click (CPC); you only pay when a consumer identifies your listing and clicks through to your site.
- Google displays and ranks PPC listings based on the Google Quality Score (a combination of bid price and clickthrough rate)
- All other engines’ PPC offerings are auction-based - i.e. PPC listings are ranked purely on bid price.
Trusted Feeds
Trusted feeds enable optimised coverage across the Yahoo! network, Froogle, and various price comparison engines for databases driven site pages. They are used in particular for optimisation of large product databases.
- ‘Instant’ indexing and optimisation of all site pages
- No need to adjust existing site design or web page content
- Quick optimisation of a large database of product pages.
