Its estimated today that search engines now account for approx 85% of all online traffic,
therefore they are an important element of any online marketing campaign.
Search engine marketing (SEM) includes various forms of search engine promotion
or advertising, also search engine optimisation and any other marketing activity that involves search engines.
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There are two main Search Engine Marketing (SEM) strategies.
1. Search Engine Optimisation ( SEO )
Optimising a website so that it ranks organically or naturally for a number of predetermined keyphrases
in the search engines indexes. These organic or natural links are free: ‹‹‹ More ›››
2. Paid or sponsored Listings (Pay per click or Paid placement)
Having the search engines list your website under a number of predetermined keyphrases in their index
and paying them a fee once a visitor clicks on these listings.‹‹‹ More ›››
Pros and Cons of both strategies
Both of these strategies have both merits and drawbacks,
here is an overview of the pros and cons of both sponsored and natural listings.
1. Pros and Cons of a Search Engine Optimisation ( SEO ) Campaign
Pros: A well executed SEO plan will enable you to finely tune your website so that it reflects who you are and what you are promoting. Also organic or natural listings will last long after the money you have set aside for your paid campaign has run out.
Cons: It can take significantly longer to achieve rankings organically as opposed to a paid campaign.
2. Paid or sponsored Listings (Pay per click or Paid placement)
Pros: Paid listings are really simple to setup and appear quickly in the index.
Cons: These links always appear in an area on the results page as “Sponsored links” which is usually to the extreme right or on top of the natural listings.
Paid links do not perform as well a organic listings ( Stuart Small from Goggle said 80% of searchers click on organic results, and 20% clicking on paid ads)
Conclusion
Pay per click is an effective short term strategy of achieving a presence on the search engines.
It will not optimise your website reflect what you are promoting.
The main drawback with PPC is one once you stop paying your presence also disappears just as quick.
Overall Conclusion
If you are launching a new website then a sponsored or PPC campaign is an excellent
short SEM strategy because your website’s listings will appear in the search engines results pages in a matter of days.
Also by running the sponsored campaign it will be afford you the opportunity to see what are the most effective keyphrases within your industry or market segment so that you can plan to target these through keyphrases through
your SEO campaign which will take longer to establish.
Also note average sales conversion are higher for SEO than that of paid listings.
with rates of 4.2 percent for SEO and 3.6 percent for PPC.
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