Online marketing
Advertising your business or organisation online: search engine marketing
When you have established your online presence, you will need to promote it.
To attract new customers who are interested in the types of services or activities your organisation offers, you may wish to consider search engine marketing (SEM). This refers to options to actively promote your website in search engines. They are additional steps to search engine optimisation, where a search engine will rank your website according to the content and related information about it.
The popularity of search engines as tools for finding relevant information online makes SEM one of the most popular ways of promoting on the internet. If your website is promoted near the top of a list of search results, this generally increases the number of people who visit your website.
SEM generally refers to paid-for advertising known as Pay Per Click (PPC) or Cost Per Click (CPC). PPC or CPC is an advertising tool that allows you to select search keywords or search terms that you think visitors to your site will use when searching for your organisation or your products and services. The purchased keywords and your website will show up at the top of search engine results or as text ads in the right-hand column. Text ads are usually listed on the search engines as ads or sponsored sites. You pay for the ad whenever someone clicks through on it to your site.
Where your ad ranks within the sponsored links depends partly on the price you are willing to pay for each click and partly on a quality score your ad receives from the search engine. This increases the likelihood that the search engine continues to serve relevant results and increases the likelihood that people will click through on sponsored links.
How the quality score is calculated by the search engines is, just like SEO indexing, kept secret. However, basic guidelines are available from the search engines which highlight areas such as historical click through rates for the keyword and your ad, the content of your ad and the content of the landing page (the page linked to your ad).
The benefit of SEM is that it provides you with the ability to reach the target audience, and reach it at a time when people are actively looking for topics relevant to your business or organisation. Additionally, you only pay for what you get. You only pay when someone clicks on the ad and is referred to your website. This means that, theoretically, a campaign does not have to cost much. CPC ads typically start from around 10 cents, but may cost several dollars for the opportunity to rank well on the search engine depending on demand for the keyword. It may be well worth testing alternative keyword terms. Search engines provide extensive advice on how to optimise, test and manage SEM.
For further information on PPC / CPC, see the following information provided by these popular search engines may be of interest:
It is important to remember that even if you engage in SEM, your website will only be ranked with basic information (primarily text) about your organisation and website and a link. If you are interested in promoting your website online with images and visual displays, you may wish to consider banner ads.
I am already online but want to get more out of it 