Marketing for research is now widely recognized as a very effective way to reach online customers. Last year, over 2 billion pounds were spent globally in online marketing and the figures are set to rise. More and more companies with an online presence are turning to search marketing to reach potential customers, generate traffic on their site and convert them into sales. So how does it all work? If you are thinking of investing a percentage of your hard earned marketing budget in search marketing, you should have a basic understanding of where it is going and how it works. Most search marketing companies talk about website improvement and page positioning, but what exactly does it mean? What you want is to increase traffic to your site, improve sales and increase the brand. How does it happen?
SEM or SM?
The marketing for research that has now eliminated the less fascinating “engine” from its previous industrial name of Search Engine Marketing consists of two disciplines: paid search and organic or natural research. Paid search is obviously what keeps Google in hyper-growth or more specifically Google Adwords. In the UK we must not forget Yahoo Search Marketing (Overture), Miva and Mirago. All of these engines allow Pay-for-Position (PfP) or Pay-per-Click (PPC) advertisers. It is important to note that such marketing is a form of advertising and such advertisements wherever they appear should be announced as “sponsored” or labeled as advertising.
Paid search
The PfP networks mentioned above are called networks because, in almost all cases, their advertisements are shown on a network of sites. The sites in the network depend on the relationship that the main advertising technology provider has with the search portals. For example, if you look for something on Google and look at Google AdWords shown, you will see the same ads on Aol.co.uk. You may notice some differences due to advertiser budgets that cause fluctuations in impressions, but they are the same.
Organic research?
Organic search or natural search results are provided by crawl search engines, more on subsequent ones. The important thing to remember is that paid search is advertising and organic research is editorial. Well, this is the analogy that the research marketing industry uses to describe the complex world of research in terminology similar to newspapers. It is a pretty good analogy because it allows us to look for people to explain search engine optimization.
Organic research and PR
So, if you wanted to advertise in a national newspaper, you can book it directly, use a media buyer, involve a creative agency and possibly a media planner. Well, you can also do it with paid search. Paid search management is big business. But what about the editorial or those scanned results? Well to influence the editorial, you could involve a public relations agency. Of course a public relations agency will not guarantee the news on the front page, but will draw up a strategy and execute on it to get results. Well, in the research world, to try to influence search engines by crawling and their organic results, you should consider search engine optimization and you might consider a search engine optimization agency. Another point of clarity, search engine optimization is a really ugly term. Do not optimize and you cannot optimize search engines, in fact optimize the website you want to get well in search engines. Unfortunately, we are stuck with SEO and not a more logical name like “optimizing search for websites”.