Search engine marketing

Getting people to visit a website is so easy, isn't it? Just build the site, submit it to Google, sit back and watch the crowds arrive. The reality just isn't that simple. In fact, without active steps to market your website, the chances are it'll languish away on page 1,234,392,292,346,487,232 in Google for the sort of search term that your customers might use to find you. Down there, you might as well be on the moon for all the visitors you'll get.

Search engine marketing (SEM) is the term for any activity designed to bring your site up the search engine rankings.

First it's necessary to understand where you need to be in the rankings. For this, take a look at the eye-tracking images on the Enquiro website.

A few things to learn from this research. First, organic search results (the 'natural' results produced by Google on the left of the page) produce far more traffic than sponsored listings. Secondly, the percentage of people that even look at a result (let alone click on it) plummets as you move down the page.

Still, the sheer volume of searches on Google may mean that if you only get a few percent of the eyeballs for a given search term, it may be a significant volume of traffic. Then again, it might not.

So, how to get your site up the search engine rankings?

There are essentially 2 ways. Either you buy your way to the top of the sponsored pay-per-click listings (accepting that these will never generate as much traffic as the unpaid listings), or you use various search engine marketing tactics. Given it can take months and even years for search engine marketing to push a website to the top of the organic results, many people use a combination of the 2: pay-per-click until they achieve high organic rankings.

The first step towards higher organic search engine rankings is to make sure that your site is optimised for the search terms your customers will use to find you (see Search Engine Optimisation). The second is to generate inbound links to your site (see Inbound Links).

How quickly will these 2 things cause you to rise up the rankings? It's impossible to say, except that the more optimised content you publish, the more good quality inbound links there are to your site, and the less you're competing for a given search term, the faster it will be. In general, though, our experience is that you should expect to see results in months, not days.

Last updated: February 2007

Related Marketing Advice From Consulttheguru.com:

• Websites - basic principles
• Search engine optimisation (SEO)
• Search engine optimisation checklist
• Inbound links
• Converting website visitors to sales
• Consult the Guru for content ideas for your website