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Ever since the rise of Google, search has been the primary way we find what we are looking for online. Before searching through portals like Yahoo, Spray and Passage, people searched where we would find the most interesting things in the huge range of what the web has to offer. In recent years, search engines have received competition from social media and an increasing proportion of the sites we choose to visit come as tips from friends in our social networks.
One of the things that makes search marketing an attractive part of a company’s market mix is that it is considered close to the purchase and thus far ahead in a customer’s decision-making process. Search marketing, known as Search Engine Marketing (SEM), is typically divided into two categories:
1. Organic search (search engine optimization, SEO) is the main search result list displayed when someone searches.
2. Paid Search, which are the ads located above or next to the search result, called Adwords with Google. This leads to two main ways to get more and better quality material in our searches:
One is to improve their ranking in organic search results, i.e. to get higher in search results on the keywords and search phrases that your customers search for when looking for services / products like yours. The work of doing so is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO). The way you achieve success with SEO is constantly changing, and depends on the search algorithm that Google is constantly updating. Basics in SEO, however, include that:
1. Your site is technically designed to help search engines find your content
2. Have an eye on which are the most important keywords and search phrases for your company
3. Create amazing content that people want to read and then link to.
Paid search (part of purchased channels as above) has the largest share of internet advertising in the world where Google Adwords is the absolutely dominant part of this market. Since campaigns can be easily purchased and booked by the advertiser itself (so-called self service) and the advertising can be done with a small budget, it is a widely used advertising form that is also common among smaller companies. Several of the bases for paid search are similar to those for organic. It is important to constantly work to find and adapt to the most important keywords and search phrases. Here too, the landing page content (the page to which the ad links) is important and that together with how many clicks your ad and relevance in the ad text represent what Google calls a Quality Score. But there is another component that determines how high your search results are and that’s how much you pay. What ultimately is required of your Quality Score and your ability to pay is determined by the competition found on the specific search phrase a user enters. So the lower the competition, the easier it is to get high among search results and vice versa.
