The benefits of search engine marketing

Search engine marketing (or SEM) has become a significant growth area for Internet businesses in the past few years, due to a number of clear benefits that this form of marketing provides, such as:

• Highly targeted - search engine marketing is one of the best forms of direct marketing, providing a technique that can be focused on the exact customer base and placing the business in front of these prospects at a time when they are actively searching for the product or service.
• Responsive - because a website can be targeted at a user when they are looking to buy, then the response rates from this activity can be very high, although this can also depend upon the quality of the website in converting visitors to sales or enquiries.
• Low entry costs - it is possible to start a search marketing campaign on a very low budget to test the market or to generate initial business for a low fee. Some level of search engine marketing should be built into the development costs of any new business website to make it work as effectively as possible. Used carefully, small companies can also easily compete alongside market leaders in many business sectors.
• Quick to implement - although the optimisation of a website can take months to have a significant effect, setting up a pay-per-click advertising campaign can be done within a day and will start to attract website visits within hours.
• Flexible - pay-per-click advertising campaigns can be adjusted and developed in response to results, providing a highly flexible form of advertising.
• Measurable - most importantly, search engine marketing campaigns can provide extensive data on the responses being achieved, allowing a high level of analysis to support and develop the campaign.
• Cost effective - any marketing campaign should generate a positive return on investment and search engine marketing has proven time and again to outperform most other forms of advertising, both online and offline.

Although these benefits are clear and can be demonstrated quite quickly, it is also true that as the search engine marketing sector becomes more popular and competitive, it can also become harder to achieve good results. You need to think of an SEM campaign as part of a strategy that covers at least 6-12 months to start seeing the best results, and you need to consider hiring a specialist agency to manage the work for you, as they will have the expertise to implement cost-effective campaigns that suit your budget.

You also need to consider your website and how effective this can be in converting visitors to enquiries and eventual sales. The first part of a successful search engine marketing campaign is to get the best prospects to visit your website. The second part is for the site - and business - to meet their expectations as efficiently as possible. This latter stage can be difficult to achieve well and you can learn more about converting visits to sales on our sister company website.

If you'd like to speak to us directly about using search engine marketing for your website, please contact us now or request a FREE website assessment to receive a 'no obligation' review of your website and our proposals on what you could achieve with a successful search engine marketing campaign.