SEM consulting and online marketing
SEM is an acronym that in English stands for Search Engine Marketing (“Search Engine Marketing”), which is the set of techniques that leverage search engines to promote one’s business and websites online.
These techniques exploit the operating characteristics of search engines, Google in the lead, to increase site visits, give visibility to brands, and invite users to engage with them.
Falling within SEM techniques are various specialties among which the main ones are:
- SEO (search engine optimization)
- SEA (search engine advertising)
- Link building and link baiting campaigns
- Content marketing
SEO - Optimizing the website to improve search engine rankings
The Internet exposes businesses to a new kind of competition that is played out first and foremost on the terrain of visibility. Since Google and other search engines have become the dominant way to search for information, products, and services, anyone who wants to grow his or her business, or even just defend it against competitors, must invest in the Web with increasing determination. There is no alternative, on pain of being displaced by competitors and becoming irrelevant, as is happening to all those companies unprepared to compete on the terrain of online commerce and e-Commerce stores.
Focusing on risk, however, makes one lose sight of the extraordinary opportunities that are instead open to those who know how to seize the potential represented by the Web and make the most of its characteristics by adapting to its dynamics. This is what SEM and in particular SEO is for, a set of techniques that aims to make a website perform according to the logic appreciated by search engines, an activity of website optimization and positioning.
And here it is good to make one thing clear right away: even the most spectacularly designed site can be totally inadequate from an SEO point of view, which is equivalent to saying irrelevant (poorly ranked) or nonexistent (not indexed) by Google and its brethren. This should make one realize that it does not matter how good the products and services one offers online are, nor how appealing and functional one’s website is if it is inaccessible.
Search marketing, through the specialty of SEO, aims to make the site more visible than its competitors, with all its pages indexed and well ranked on search engines for the keywords that matter.
Because SEO interventions are mostly invisible to the layman, in the sense that they do not find immediate evidence on the screen, it is difficult for companies without in-house expertise in this area to evaluate the work done by web agencies and SEM/SEO specialists. However, there are useful clues to evaluate SEO services as they are provided, although of course it is even more important to evaluate the final results of a campaign through indicators and metrics derived from the data collected. To this end, website monitoring tools come to our rescue: one of the best is Google Analytics.
Site ranking for certain keywords and the total number of hits are the primary indicators, monitoring data analysis (comparing data after time) the way to evaluate the work done.
SEA: advertising and ads on Google (Google Ads - Adwords) and other search engines
- control of advertising spending. The budget and maximum spending threshold per user click(Cost Per Click – CPC) is established;
- complete dominance over the target audience. By choosing to run ads only in response to the use of certain keywords, you are assured of serving highly targeted advertising shown on time to a target audience;
- the Pay Per Click (PPC) model guarantees free exposure of ads when they are not clicked: a form of zero-cost branding;
- great flexibility. As many ads are created as products and services are to be promoted. The target keywords of the campaign are established at the planning stage (unless added or changed later), and after clicking, users land on precise pages of the site that can be set up ad hoc. In Italy, talking about Internet advertising is becoming synonymous with Google Ads (formerly Google Adwords). Mind you, advertising is also done on other major search engines such as Yahoo or Bing, but Google Ads is necessary to run ads on Google, i.e., the engine that catalyzes almost all web searches, at least in our country. As a specialty of SEM, adwords campaigns are a formidable advertising tool useful for all consumer-facing (b2c) businesses. In case the site is not well positioned online, this marketing strategy is even more essential because it allows to circumvent a visibility flaw on keyword searches with targeted advertising exposure.
Link building and link baiting campaigns. Another SEM technique
Web sites are not realities isolated from the network context in which they come together with their creation. Each site is part of a giant ecosystem of Internet sites that can relate to each other through links: bridges that connect Web pages. When links connect two pages belonging to two different sites, a relationship is established whereby the site that receives the link from outside, constituting its destination, will see in it a source of visits, a positive fact whatever the purpose that prompted the creation of the site.
It follows that the more direct links to a website (coming from outside), the greater the amount of inbound visitor traffic that will develop. Of course, this also depends on which sites constitute the sources of the external links. Links from blogs and portals with many visits (sometimes as many as hundreds of thousands per day) clearly constitute a highly coveted but difficult to obtain traffic potential.
Artfully building inbound links is part of SEM techniques. It is a true marketing strategy that aims to get a website an increasing number of visitor sources to increase the visibility of its services. Increasing a site’s communication channels with the wider digital ecosystem around it results in an increase in backlinks (incoming links) with obvious benefits for one’s online business.
This scientific backlink building is conducted in two prevalent ways:
- link building. Insertion of links to your site in thematic directories and industry portals, link exchange, publication of articles (article marketing), insertion of links in social channels, etc.;
- link baiting. Creation of content that by its characteristics and quality generates spontaneous links. This occurs when content triggers a mechanism of interest that prompts users to spread links to that content spontaneously. In this sense, link bait is a concept contiguous with word of mouth that generates viral spread of content.
The question that needs to be asked at this point is: why should these techniques be considered a specialty of SEM, i.e., marketing that exploits search engines, since no keyword research occurs here as we have seen in the cases (SEO and SEA) analyzed above? After all, doesn’t a link directly connecting two websites bypass Google?
The answer is that the number and particularly the quality of these links are among the factors analyzed by search engines to determine the value and thus the ranking of a website. This is why the activity of building backlinks (inbound and therefore external to one’s site) can be considered a form of off-site SEO and therefore Search Marketing (SEM).
If the quality of links influences the ranking of websites, it is important to work in this direction having in mind what variables determine the value of links. Among them, the most important are:
- The reputation of the site from which the backlink comes;
- The value/positioning of the page it came from;
- the thematic relevance of that page to the page (on one’s own site) to which it is linked.
Authors of these merit evaluations are, exclusively and unquestionably, the search engines: therefore, marketing at this level should be considered search marketing, i.e. SEM.
Content marketing as an SEM strategy
Content marketing is a business technique that uses informational and entertainment content to generate website visits and amplify business communication. Content can be made in various formats: text, images, video, slides, pdf or other.
Once they are created they are circulated by promoting them on social channels and wherever they can be shared and relaunched by other users producing a viral effect.
When the content produced is accessible to search engines it falls into the domain of SEM, and of course SEO optimization, as one of the techniques available to gain visibility on the Web.
By also leveraging search engines, content marketing aspires to index all the content created and position it well among the results returned after user searches. In these terms SEM, SEO and content marketing are elements of a single strategy that aims to attract new visitors.
Maximum effectiveness is achieved when the content produced is regularly optimized by SEO and SEM experts.
Finally, it should be pointed out that where quality content stimulates the creation of spontaneous backlinks on third-party sites there is a coincidence between content marketing and link baiting.
Consulting and SEM campaigns
In addition to the strategies outlined in brief, there are other techniques and specialties that help to enhance the value of websites and businesses that promote online. Social media marketing, that is, the use of social networks and online communities for promotional purposes, is probably the most important and deserves separate discussion.
The reason it can also be included among SEM and search marketing tools is that social channels are one of the factors evaluated by search engines to judge a website’s reputation/relevance. The more social engagement a website generates, the more significant its online presence is considered by Google and the other engines.
The social channels themselves should be considered sites on which to do search engine optimization, so much so that there is a specific discipline called SMO (Social Media Optimization) that transfers SEO practices within corporate social networks to improve ranking and positive website spillovers.
It will be clear at this point that planning and developing a web marketing strategy that takes full advantage of the potential of SEM is a complex operation whose success will also depend on how well these activities are integrated with the functions and management of business processes as a whole.
SEM campaigns (SEO and SEA first and foremost) have tremendous potential that is especially revealed when they are crafted with an awareness of the client company’s value framework. The challenge is to find the right marketing mix to leverage, working on the details and nuances.
The web marketing expert will have to act from this perspective, adapting his or her working tools to the characteristics of the enterprise with which he or she works.
By this route the results will not be long in coming.