Simply put, search engine marketing (SEM) is about connecting searchers looking for information related to your brand with what they are looking for. It is about making your brand visible within the search engines to attract new visitors to your site(s).
SEM helps site owners meet their various online marketing objectives such as generating leads, sales or simply building awareness and delivering the right message to their audience.
Within SEM, there are three main opportunities for organizations to get their message across, to gain visibility and to direct visitors to their sites.
1.The natural or organic listings: The part of the pages listing results from a search engine query which are displayed in a sequence according to relevance of match between the keyword phrase typed into a search engine and a web page according to a ranking algorithm used by the search engine.
2. The paid or sponsored listings: A relevant ad (typically a text ad) with a link to a destination page is displayed when the user of a search engine types in a specific phrase. A fee is charged for every click of each link, with the amount bid for the click the main factor determining its position.
3. Content-network listings: These ads are displayed on third party sites that have an Adsense relationship with Google, or which display Yahoo or MIVA listings on their website. These actually account for a sizeable proportion of Google revenue1, but tend to have much lower clickthrough rates.
Search engine optimization (SEO)SEO is aimed at achieving the highest position practically possible in the organic listings on the search engine results pages. To do this you need to define a list of keyphrases to work with.
Advantages of SEO:Few would argue that SEO is potentially the most important search marketing approach for marketers since most searchers click on the natural listings.
Indeed, research shows that some searchers NEVER click on the sponsored listings. Others still don’t realise these links are paid-for.
Generally, the 80:20 rule holds true with 80% of the clicks on natural listings and 20%1 of the clicks on the paid listings as suggested by the first Stats box earlier in this section.
Additionally, the cost of SEO is relatively fixed, independent of click volume. Effectively, the cost per click from SEO declines through time after initial optimization costs and lower ongoing optimization costs. Conversely, paid-search is essentially a variable cost.
Disadvantages of SEO:The challenge of SEO is that there are over 8 billion pages1 in the search engine indexes with your position in the SERPs dependent on a constantly changing algorithm which is not published. So making your pages visible may require specialist knowledge, constant monitoring and the ability to respond.
As a consequence, the biggest disadvantage of SEO is a lack of control. You are subject to changes in the algorithm.
There are other possible issues. You may be prevented from competing on a level playing field, because competitors and even affiliates may use less ethical black hat SEO techniques.
In competitive sectors it may be very difficult to get listed in the top few results for competitive phrases. This is when PPC may have to be used, although this can be expensive in a competitive sector.
his lack of visibility makes it difficult to make a definitive business case for SEO, although it is fairly obvious what a sought-after number one position on Google would do for most companies.
It is nevertheless impossible to predict and guarantee positions and click volumes from SEO, because the impact of future changes to the algorithm is unknown. Ditto competitor activity – you don’t know what they’ll be doing in future.
