According to eCommera, report, Online retail continues to grow, with 42.6% of UK consumers buy online at least once a week, and the average online spend per shopper reached £71 per month. This amplifies the importance of online presence for small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). Having just a website with out appropriate promotion will not give any advantages what so ever no matter how effective and user friendly your website is. Search engine marketing is the most effective way of promoting website in the cyber space.
In the age of information explosion the volume of information on the Internet is growing and the web has become a huge warehouse of vast information resources. However, effective access to the most relevant resources available on the Internet is one of the chief concerns for users and becoming a critical problem. In this situation Internet search engines and search engine based portals become navigator to their users.
Search engine marketing can be vital to a business because 90% of all online traffic is achieved through the various search engines. Search engines are emerging as a new form of intermediaries in the cyber world. So, any organisation who can exploit the opportunities provided by internet search engines can achieve sustainable competitive advantage. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is an umbrella term that covers two broad areas:
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)It is the process of getting traffic from the organic or natural listings on search engines. SEO is free way to achieve traffic to your website however SEO encompasses a wide variety of tasks which obviously cost money and time and need to wait longer period of time to see tangible value.
Paid Search Marketing -Pay Per Click (PPC)
Paid search marketing commonly known as Pay per Click (PPC) is the quickest way to see tangible results in online marketing. Pay-Per-click (PPC) advertising provides excellent opportunity for Business to target, relevant online ads to audiences when they are actively searching for; within a controlled budget, and results are easy to measure. And of course audiences can be targeted in every stages of the buying cycle. This dynamic area of online marketing already worth around £ 3 billion in UK per year and possesses huge potentiality of growth.
Each of the main search engines has it’s own advertising programmes- Google : Google Adwords
- Yahoo: Yahoo! Search Marketing
- Bing: Microsoft adCenter
Google as Google is continuously dominating the search market. Latest search engines market share report shows that in UK more than 91.07% searches are done through Google, 2.7% through Yahoo and 3.1% through Bing. Hence, there is valid reason to concentrate your optimisation in Google Adwords later Google’s optimised campaigns can be replicated to other search engines easily.
