This article provides an overview of the main methods for a business website to achieve visibility and exposure via the leading search engines. Search engines are viewed in this regard as an additional and potentially leading channel for obtaining new clients and new business.
In the past two-three years there has been an immense progress in analytic and technological tools that help in mapping and understanding online user's behavior and trends across the internet. While internet usage rates have exploded in terms of growth, an even more important phenomenon is the growing willingness of users to perform financial transactions over the internet. This is mainly a result of the growing sense of security and familiarity that people have towards the internet medium.
With the improvement in tracking and analysis, comes the realization of the business importance of a significant and targeted presence at the leading search engines i.e. Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL and few more. This article will try to present the options available for businesses to utilize the search engines as a profitable and growing advertising channel.
Why search engines?
As the main tool for finding information over the internet, search engines link tens of millions of web users with the information, products and services they are looking for. As far as acting as a user gateway, many surveys indicate that search engines are responsible for 85%-90% of new website entries.
The advantage of the search engine channel over other advertising channels is that the information served to the user is actively invoked by the user himself, instead of being exposed in an aggressive manner (and against the user's will in many cases) to advertisement channels such as TV, radio, newspapers, email marketing, banner popup and so forth. With search engines, the user initiates the contact, which essentially improves the conversion ratio: the number of times a listing such as a link/ad/banner has been shown (or number of impressions) divided by the number of clicks on that link/ad/banner. Conversion ratios are substantially higher in search engine channels in comparison to most if not all other online advertising channels.
Companies that neglect to realize the opportunities and changing behavior patterns of web users will lag behind while their competitors, who nowadays take advantage of the search engine opportunity, capture a greater search engine market share.
Search Engine Marketing Options
There are two main options for marketing a website through search engines:
1. Investment of resources on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) of a website with the goal of achieving high rankings in "organic" (or "natural") search engine results of search engines. Organic search results are those that the engine has found as being relevant for the input search query; the results are ordered by rank of relevance.
Search engines are constantly "crawling" the net for retrieval and archiving of new web documents, updating currently indexed pages and rankings and evaluating web page relevance for different search queries. Organic search results are not up for sale and their visual presentation on the search engine results page (SERP) varies between different search engines.
Search engine Optimization (SEO) is process that involves:
a. Exposing the majority of the website's pages and content to the search engine crawlers, allowing them to index as much of the site content as possible in their databases. This may include a link building campaign in order to generate certain links that point to the website's pages.
b. Writing and constructing the contents in a way that will render it highly relevant by the search engine, for a select number of targeted search strings, carefully chosen to target the website potential audience.
Selection of the targeted terms is an important part in the SEO process and there are some good statistical-based tools to assist with this step. The technical implementation of the SEO process varies from website to website according to the: nature of the website, specific marketing and editorial guidelines, amounts and quality of content, the structure of internal linking and flexibility of the design patterns. Professionally executed SEO should not usually impede on the user experience and, in most cases, actually adds value to users as useful content is added, site navigation improves and pages become compatible with a greater number of browsing applications and devices.The SEO process also includes a link building campaign in which incoming links to a target page are established on other web pages. Search engine algorithms put an emphasis on topic-related incoming links from sources considered by them to be of high-value or authority on a given topic. The logic behind this evaluation system is that any link from site A to site B is a "vote" from site A to site B, hence the more "quality" votes that a website receives - it is probably more valuable and thus should be given a priority over sites with less votes, all other parameters are equal. Moreover, a "vote" from a source that is considered to be from the same or related topic is better than a "vote" from a source belonging to an unrelated topic. Thus, it is possible that even one link from Yahoo! Finance to a website of financial services provider would be better than 100 links from pages that provide information about, say, cars.
Obtaining significant placements in competitive online markets is impossible without a considerable amount of quality, topic-related, incoming links.
2. The second main option for exposure at search engines is buying text advertising presented alongside the organic results in the SERP. The payment is by the bid method. The buyer bids for specific search terms and any click on the ad (referring the clicking user to the buyer's site) costs the advertiser the amount of the bid. This pricing model is known as CPC - Cost per Click and the advertising method is known as PPC -Pay per Click. The leading suppliers are Google, with their Google Adwards program and Overture, owned by Yahoo. There are also other advertising models such as PPI - Pay per Inclusion, where the advertiser pays for impressions and not clicks. However, the dominant model today is PPC.
The visual presentation of the ads in the SERP has a strong impact on CTR (Click through Rate). Moreover, the words of the ads can make or break an ad.
Visual presentation of results and ads in the search results page
The visual layout of the organic and paid listings/ads in the SERP has a strong impact on the effectiveness of both. Leading search engines such as Google and Yahoo! distinguish between the two types a highly-visible manner. Google gives priority to organic results and displays them on the (more valuable) left-hand side, covering about two thirds of the screen width. The sponsored results are smaller, displayed on the right hand side. And no more than 2 sponsored results are displayed above organic results. On the other hand, Yahoo! displays up to 5 sponsored links (those with the highest bids) above organic results. Like Google, Yahoo! also displays sponsored links on the right hand side. Still, Yahoo! distinguishes between organic and paid listings in a clear visual manner.
All in all, there is an attempt by the search engines to balance between two goals. The first is providing value to the user by displaying the organic results which the engine found as the most relevant for the user's query. The second is to generate revenue from clicks on paid ads. In essence, Google currently tends to favor its users' need to find relevant information while Yahoo gives more weight to paid listings in order to maximize revenues.
Search engine optimization vs. PPC
So what is the best course of action for when formulating a winning search engine promotion strategy? Investing in search engine optimization? Or in PPC campaign? In both?
In general, the answer will be derived from the urgency of the need to generate traffic, the advertising budget and limitations, which include the search engine friendliness of the website's design as well as the available content that can be optimized. In most cases, the best strategy is mixing both and in any case - results need to be measured and managed in order to maximize the return on investment (ROI).