SEM in Detail
All online businesses can benefit from SEM. So we have to look at updating our modus operandi. Any service or product related company must have a website – that’s a given. Yet that in itself isn’t sufficient. If nobody can find you, you might just as well not be there!
Visualise this scenario – a group of business people set up shop: A lot of money has gone into setting it up. The staff are all poised – And discover they’re in a tiny backstreet, 3 miles out of the city centre on the 4th floor, and the road outside is closed due to a diversion. Nobody will know how to reach them. Can you see a fundamental flaw? The vast majority of business websites have just this problem.
Promotional work and marketing have entered a new phase with the advent of the internet. There was an idea that everyone should have a website around ten years ago. It wasn’t uncommon for businesses to spend huge amounts getting all the fancy bells and whistles on their site. (A happy situation for web design businesses…) Then it became apparent that no-one was visiting these sites. Surely a big website should attract lots of customers? In fact, this wasn’t the case at all.
Websites have to be marketed, and in a completely different way to previous methods. A traditional marketing guru would tell you that your website is your online catalogue or advert of services. Therefore, you’ll need to utilise all the normal marketing channels (print, radio, TV, media etc.) to drive traffic to that site. In other words, doing what they know. First they make a nice looking catalogue. Then they utilise various marketing methods to get people to look at the catalogue. This is a fundamental misconception of the on-line economy.
This process only utilises the web as viewing gallery, which is quite wrong. It is a completely interactive place where billions of people can research, examine, discuss and choose services and products in the comfort of their own home. We can find the sites we’re looking for because Google, Bing and Yahoo etc. have formulated huge site directories to simplify the task. Think of the chaos involved if the Business Yellow Pages wasn’t in alphabetical order: We’d be forever frustrated and disappointed.
The Search Engines solve this dilemma. However, this means marketing is no longer the same. If you want customers to find you on the internet, indexation by Google etc. is paramount. Even that isn’t enough though. You might as well forget it if you’re several pages in!
So to give all companies a chance to be on the first pages, the Search Engines came up with a new form of paid advertising. It’s called Pay Per Click, and advertisers are only charged when someone ‘clicks’ on their ad. It was revolutionary. Because now you didn’t have to spend anything until an interested person looked at your web page. This is an incredibly targeted way of advertising, and done properly, can yield some exceptional results.
However, most fields are completely over-run with PPC ads today. Predominantly because of a wealth of new bidders who lack experience, the cost per click has been driven upwards. So it’s often the case now that many are priced out of the market. Particularly where it takes a large number of enquiries per sale. This has brought Search Engine Optimisation to the fore, where driving a site to page one is the goal.
To illustrate the challenge: Get onto one of the Search Engines now and look for some keywords that you think apply to you. Can you see your website on the 1st three pages? Most likely not. Which means you’re just like the shop in the middle of nowhere. If the answer was yes, are those terms actually being used by customers?
Maybe you’ve already tried some Pay Per Click advertising so you appear in the paid listings, and maybe you’ve achieved some success so far. Are you managing your campaign well though? Are the returns you’re getting good enough? Have you got an eye on the stats that measure your results? With PPC, testing and diagnostics are critical. Your ROI will be compromised without sufficient data.
Global figures clearly demonstrate that commercial marketing is swiftly moving online. Companies must acknowledge this, to survive and flourish in today’s economy.
