Search engine marketing, in the broadest sense, refers to a set of strategies and techniques designed to help companies benefit from the activity that takes place on internet search engines. That activity is important because internet search has increasingly become today’s equivalent of the “yellow pages”; buyers use their keyboards and mice to identify shops that want to visit rather than their fingers “doing the walking” flipping the yellow pages . Yellow page publishing was always been a very good business (although much less a good business since Google and the search engines came along) because it combined the user’s specific and strong buyer interest with a set of product and service categories. Google and search engines in general are able to do that in a much more efficient manner by matching the search query with advertisers (who needs print anymore?).
The rising new discipline of search engine marketing has to do with activities, both paid and unpaid, that attempt to garner a significant share of the links that a search engine user might use after getting a result page from a search engine. Within the discipline, practitioners differentiate between “search engine optimization’ (SEO) which are techniques and practices designed to improve rankings within the search engine’s “free” or “organic” listings, and “search engine marketing” or SEM in the narrow sense which is management of the search engine’s paid advertising services.
Given the volume of traffic and revenue that can follow successful implementation of SEO and SEM strategies, it can safely be said that these new disciplines are among the most competitive marketing activities ever undertaken. There are literally thousands of self-proclaimed experts in the field, and given that Google never reveals the secret algorithms that determines winner and losers, it makes it extremely difficult for a buyer of SEO and SEM services to fugure our there to turn.
At Resolute Digital, we offers a few words of advice.
1) Your SEM or SEO vendor has to extremely familiar with Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics (or another major analytics package). Without a detailed understanding of these tools, they (and you) will be “dancing in the dark: which will surely cost you money. We’re not talking about finding vendors that are “Google certified” because we’d like our analysts to be independently trained. We don’t think it makes a lot of sense to use vendors that are trained by the company selling you the advertising.
2) Your vendor should be very comfortable with the more robust analytics software like Omniture, Unica, or Clicktracks (Lyris) since you may decide to avoid the Google “free” packages [Google supplies the software free of charge but gives itself a license, if you accept the Ts&Cs to your data].
3) Your vendor needs to have programmers who are familiar with the APIs (application programming interfaces) of Google, Yahoo , and MSN (Bing) since it is virtually impossible to find efficiencies in these systems without using large volumes of keywords which requires an automated interface to manage (image managing the bids of 10 million keywords manually!).
4) Your vendor needs to have programmers that are still active. Don’t sign up for an agency that uses software written 10 years ago.
5) From an SEO (free) perspective, signing on with the wrong vendor can land you in a Google “doghouse” that might takes years to get out of. The initial SEO activity is all about details: select the right keywords to optimize for, getting unique title tags and meta description associated with each distinct page or url, and rewriting urls to simple and memorable urls if needed. After all that, it’s then a process of identfying the right sites to link to you, contacting them, and convincing them you are worth a link. Any shortcut in this process of likely to get you in the dreaded doghouse.
There are obviously many more details and issues to consider, but the above tips are enough to get you started. When you are ready to work with a professional, give us a call.
