Search Marketing
Keyword Analysis tells you where your audience is online and what they’re searching for. Next it’s time to throw out your bait with Search Marketing.
There are two ways to do this:
Organic search (based on clicks from organic search results) refers to the ordinary search engine listings.
Paid search (pay-per-click, such as AdWords) refers to the sponsored links you see on the right-hand side, or sometimes the top of the page, when you use Google.
Organic search
When someone keys in a word or phrase into a search engine such as Google, imagine hundreds of little spiders crawling the worldwide web in search of relevant content. What are they looking for? How do they decide which pages to list as the most highly relevant to the search?
While the web search process remains somewhat mysterious, there are some things we do know about how to attract those spiders.
First your site must be indexed with the relevant search engine, and that’s easy to do. Then your energy needs to be focused on:
- authoritative, relevant and regularly updated content that is optimised for keywords,
- good quality back-links from other equally authoritative and relevant sites.
1. Authoritative, relevant, regularly updated, optimised content
Create an authority page for each of your keywords, so the search engines have a clear result page for each. These will attract browsers and searchers to content on your site that is directly relevant to their search.
Note that a page that focuses on a single topic is regarded by the spiders as more highly relevant than a page that covers several topics. So if someone is searching for abseiling, a page that is all about abseiling will get more attention from the spiders than one that covers abseiling, rock-climbing, white-water rafting and a host of other adventure activities.
With a good, self-managed site platform, you can add as many pages as you want at no extra cost to you. You can also ensure that keywords are properly integrated into your page headings and article headings - another important magnet for the spiders.
A carefully prepared authority page can then lead your site visitors into taking action - submitting an enquiry, signing up for a newsletter, placing and order, or booking a service.
Having a blog with categories for your target keywords will also help your search engine ranking, particularly because blogs are continually updated and refreshed - something the spiders love. You can also upload your newsletters and press releases - all easy to do with a self-managed site.
2. Good quality back-links from other equally authoritative and relevant sites
Back-links will be achieved through good quality content that links out to other highly-regarded, high-traffic sites. You can ask for back-links, but even better to link to others with content that they see as valuable. This blog post explains back-links with some input from a small tourism operator.
An effective way to incorporate useful links into your site is via your blog, where you’ll have endless opportunities to offer a heap of useful information to your readers. Include links to sites that you recommend - particuarly pages and blog posts on those sites that are directly relevant to the content in your page or blog post - and you will attract the attention of those other sites and bloggers.
Back-links are virtually guaranteed if your content is equally compelling and useful.
It’s important to understand that building up organic search traffic takes time, but once you achieve a steady flow, your site will work for you 24-7 with only a regular time-slot investment on your part.
Paid search
To get your link to appear in the right hand side of the search results, you need to pay. Google and Yahoo are the two main pay-per-click advertising providers. With pay-per-click, you define your keywords, bid for them and write short ads with a link to your site landing page. When you run the ads, the search engine displays your ad when a relevant keyword is entered by a searcher.
When a searcher clicks on your ad and is sent to your authority (or landing) page, you pay for the click. What you pay relates mostly to how much you bid (although there are a few other factors).
You can set up budgets to make sure your advertising costs don’t spiral out of control. But for many niche advertisers, you can advertise very effectively and pay between 20c and 60c per click.
This method increases traffic in the short term as your ad will appear higher in the right-hand column more quickly than in the organic search ranking on the left.
