Search Engine Marketing presentation from a workshop in Belgium titled: "Wie zoekt die vindt...of niet?". Overview on SEM, SEO, PPC and Landing Pages. Presentation and workshop by WSI E-Services and Daronet Europe
3. WHY ARE WE HERE TODAY? “Buying a Website without Search Engine Optimization or Pay Per Click is like spending your entire budget on a commercial without buying any airtime to show it to the world.” AnizRuda JPMorgan Chase
63. START WEB DESIGN WITH SEO “If you're thinking about hiring an SEO, the earlier the better. A great time to hire is when you're considering a site redesign, or planning to launch a new site.” >>Google Webmaster Guidelines
71. WHAT WILL MAKE THEM CLICK Headline contains your KEYWORDS 2nd line: contains a BENEFIT 3rd line: contains a FEATURE 4th line: Display URL has a KEYWORD (i.e. www.domain.ext/keyword)
89. WSI – WE SIMPLY THE INTERNET 1500 offices 87 Countries 8+ Production & Solution Centers 345 Certified Google Experts 35 Certified Analytics Experts 28 Certified Conversion Specialists 381 SEO Content Developers 182 Certified Landing Page Developers More than 32,000 customers worldwide More than 200,000 results in Google for “Created and Maintained by WSI”
There are some golden nuggets in the presentation. Whenever and wherever you see this golden egg on a slide, pay extra attention
It’s about getting in front of people who are looking for what you sell, ‘right this moment’ and then ‘getting them to respond’.There has never been anything like this type of marketing.For ages and generations, marketers were dreaming of potential customers to contact them at the right moment that they are of a need for their products and/or services.This is Search Engine Marketing: performing marketing and sales activities where people are mostly using for the buying habits in modern life.
Why are we talking about SEM? What makes it so important?
Since we are dealing with SEARCH ENGINE marketing, we need to take a look at the search engines. To be more accurate – THE search engine, meaning Google. It dominants about 90% of the search in the western world, and about 93% in Belgium.So we can understand and remember how significant Google is to us, we actually are using its name as a verb “to Google” something or someone, which simply means: search it online (search is Google).
So why do we need to worry about our website and its appearance with Search Engines. Here is why: Google reported in July 2008 that it has over 1 trillion web pages (!)And with this amount of pages, Google isn’t really waiting for any of your site to come. Please remember that we are talking on web-PAGES and not web-SITES. Websites are just a collection of pages, and every page has its own importance. Therefore, when dealing with Search Engine Marketing, our point of reference is first a page and only then a site.
Why is it that we are using Google? What is the secret that caused Google to be so successful?Tell the Google story as an anecdote (try to sell their engine to Yahoo that didn’t see money in search engines, decided to keep going for the fun and the rest is history). Their secret (on top of speed and ability to index huge amount of data) is RELEVANCY!We all look for the most relevant results for what we are searching. This what Google does best.Take it as a point to remember: in order to be successful with search engine and in search engine marketing, you need to be relevant to the search queries. The rest is just parameters to emphasize it and how to be relevant, but this is the key to everything.
Spiders search the Internet to find web pages. Their main way to find those pages is with links from one page to another. Remember this point as it will be important later in the presentation.They read each page they findThey determine what the page is aboutThey index each pageWhat is important to remember is that they can’t crawl the entire web every day, or even every week. This is why (a) they keep a cached version (sort of an offline version of a page) in their index until the next crawl, and (b) it takes time for new pages (sites) or updated once to get indexed.
This is an example of a cached page on Google index. As you can see, it has no images and mainly text. This is the correct way of how a search engine should see any of your pages. This is not what you will get when the site is built in Flash. Search engines are looking for plain good content in text. Images have also value, but are second-graded and are always required to contain Alt Tags (what you see when you place your mouse over an image, assuming Alt Tag was placed on that image).There are various simulators available online to simulate what a search engine sees when crawling your pages. Worthwhile exercise to run.
Let’s first try to understand the difference between traditional marketing and search engine marketing
In traditional marketing you must interrupt (t.v. ads, radio, direct mail, etc.). Push methodIn Search Engine Marketing prospects or clients come looking for you. Pull method
With traditional media it’s like a needle in a hay stuck. You are sending a message to a huge public, hoping to reach for those that are of a need for your offering at that exact moment (since if it is later, you need them to remember that they saw your ad). The required investment is much bigger that way, surely in order to cross the “critical mass” of advertising.
SEM is exactly the opposite and a completely different concept. Imagine that – you are presenting yourself when people are searching for your products and services, where they are looking. Everything is happening now. The initial intent cycle is much shorter and there is almost no need for recollection of your target audience. This is why David Ogilvy came up with this quote: your marketing efforts should focus on being there when people are looking for you, better said – looking for what you have to sell.
The key – like with any marketing activity is Return on Investment. That is – how many Euros you are making in return for your marketing investment. This is how any business should measure itself and it became even much more important following last year’s recession as pressure increased to show return on investment with any marketing activity.
And when talking on measurable ROI, let’s see some details: this is a result of a survey done by MarketingSherpa (one of the most important marketing research firms in the world), beginning of 2009. The horizontal axis is the relative cost and the vertical one is the contribution of the different strategies to lead generation (good goal for checking ROI). We can see that traditional means like Direct Mail and Print Advertising were placed on the right-bottom corner of the diagram (meaning – very expensive with very low yield), where SEO is almost at the most left-top corner (meaning lowest cost and highest yield). This is the biggest concept of SEM.
The good news: in the search engine marketing realm, everything is measurable! How many times have you done any marketing campaign but couldn’t really tell how many prospects or customers you got as a result of it? It is like shooting in the dark.In SEM, we measure everything: it’s very easy to measure the investment but it’s also relatively easy to measure the outcomes! Doesn’t work? Change or even lose it. Working well? Add more budget to make more value.Don’t miss our March workshop on Analytics, as we will explain the basics of internet marketing measurements.