If you have a web site you are probably interested in having it show up on a search engine. I mean why would you build something and not want people to find it especially if it is promoting your business. In our “Get Your Business Found” theme for this month, we are looking at the different types of search marketing out there and how to use them. There are essentially three – organic search, pay-per-click and social media. Let’s look at each and the sub-sections below them.
Broadly approached as a great standalone marketing strategy, social media marketing is integrated more and more with search engine optimization (SEO). If you are wondering why social media marketing has been so widely adopted by those in the SEO industry is because of the dramatic impact that social media has directly on search engine listings.
Type #1 – Organic or Natural Search
Organic or natural search free part of Search Engine Marketing. The goal is to earn top rankings in free search engines which are called “natural” listings. In this instance you work to optimize your site giving the search engines what they’re looking for so that it is listed properly improving your ranking and hopefully making the front page. There are a few tricks to making this work and I recommend hiring a consultant or service provider that can optimize your site properly. Trust me, it will be money well spent. Here is a well accepted process to maximize your SEO:
- Find the most relevant keywords for your market
- Plug those keywords into the headlines, subheads and body copy of your web pages but use them sparingly
- Get inbound links to your site through things like blogs. It is what the spiders love the most because it is “natural”.
- Keep the search engine “spiders” coming back with frequent new content. Blogs are a good example of this.
- Use a site map because the spiders take a top level link and dive deep into your web page indexing all of your web pages
- Don’t be dense with keywords or the search engine spyders will see right though it
It is important to note that while this is the most cost effective approach to getting your site traffic, it will take time. If you need traffic immediately, you will have to add Pay-Per-Click (PPC) to your strategy.
Type #2 – Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC)
If you have used a search engine, and I am sure you have, you have seen results that are up at the top or off to the side and colored differently than the standard results. That is because someone paid to get there. The way it generally works is that the search engine company has keywords set at a certain price for a level of “clickthroughs” or when people actually click on the link to get to your site. You can also use various web site provider packages to help you manage this effort. There are some advantages and disadvantages to this strategy.
Advantages
- Your web site shows up immediately in search engines which is great when you are really trying to do time sensitive campaigns
- It is a great way to test keyword effectiveness that you will want to integrate into your natural SEO strategy
- You only pay for the clickthroughs to your site
Disadvantages
- It can be costly because you might pick expensive keywords that are so hot your marketing budget could get blown right out the window
- Competitors can intentially clickthrough to your site making your costs go up, although this has been fixed by search engine providers to prevent fraud
Emergine Trend of Local Search – This is related to pay-per-click and can be incorporated into your advertising budget.
Type #3 – Social Media and SEO
This type of search is related to organic search because this type of content – blogs, Twitter, Facebook, etc is crawled by search engines. It also presents your site as fresh and updated which helps your ranks. We separate this because in many places they have search engines (i.e. Twitter) in their own right and are used to lead people in a direct path to your web site or content. Search Engine Land has three ways Social Media helps SEO and they are:
1) Getting quality, relevant inbound links – The best thing about this is that the majority (if not all) of the links that come from a social media marketing campaign are natural links; they’re not reciprocated, bought, or solicited
2) Using social media websites for reputation management – Lots of social media sites, especially the more popular ones, rank very well within the search engines. This can be both a positive and negative thing when it comes to managing your reputation.
3) Ranking pages on social media websites – If you’re launching a brand new site and you know it’s going to be awhile before it ranks, you might want to consider uploading some videos to YouTube or creating a MySpace profile and building a few good links to it. I’m not saying it’s better to have these pages rank than your own site, but it’s definitely better than not having anything ranked.
Create a Blended Strategy for the Best Results
As time goes on, a strategy utilizing both approaches is the way to go. Over time, your site will increase its ranking in search results and you can reduce your PPC for direct and general keyword hits. This will allow you to use PPC for more targeted efforts like product launches and specific campaigns. Lastly, it is important to note that you should not rest on what you have done and keep your site fresh and relevant. Using content systems like blogs and other social media services like Twitter and Facebook can maximize your content exposure and reaches various audiences. Techniques and search engine algorithms are updated all the time as more people learn to “game” a certain aspect of the system.
Photo Courtesy of DMOZ.
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Tags: PPC, Search Marketing, seo, social media
Posted in Marketing, Search Marketing, social media | 25 Comments »
