Statistically, 60% of all off-line purchases are now preceeded by an online search through a search engine (Google or Yahoo etc). So whether or not your business has an e-commerce site (where people can buy from you online), online searching is now an important part of the buying process for a customer, and important for your company if you want to increase sales.

When a business advertises in a newspaper, magazine or radio, how can you tell how effective that advert has been? With search marketing you can see how well you are performing on a daily basis, and this means that you can calculate a return on investment (ROI) and decide whether to reduce your spending, or increase it. Either saving you money, or spending your marketing budget on advertising that works!

I've explained the basics below, but please feel free to contact me if you want to have a further chat about search marketing.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is traditionally split into 2 categories:

Paid placement and organic placement.

If you search within Google (for example), below is an example of a Search Engine Results Page (SERP) that Google will return, and an explanation of what you'll see:

Paid placement (or PayPerClick (PPC)) is often used at the beginning of a websites life to obtain instant visibility within Google, Yahoo, Live, Ask etc. It usually requires a monthly budget, and where your advert ranks on the results page is based on a bidding system. The more you bid, the higher your advert will be. Ideally, you will have to identify around 20-30 keywords/phrases for which you want to be seen. ie if you are a retailer of hats you may choose "Top Hat", "Bowler Hat" etc. Depending on your competition, you could pay from £0.05 to £10.00 per click for some keywords. Remember though, that you only pay for the click, not for your ad to appear.

High organic placement can take time (3-6 months) and a lot of persistant effort. Once you're there, you can't afford to neglect your site otherwise it will slip back down the rankings, and become less visible to potential customers. In the long term organic ranking is the preferable direction for your Search Marketing strategy because it is FREE.

There are many parts to making sure you rank organically high within Google, Yahoo! or Live, and Facio Design can take care of all of them for you. I will never use unethical 'black hat' techniques because believe in making the web as user friendly as possible. I can optimise your site so that it is search engine friendly, build quality inbound links from reputable high page-rank sites and directories.

If you have any questions about Search Engine Optimisation, please feel free to contact me