Tuesday, April 3, 2012

Search Engine Marketing for the Brick and Mortar Business

Online businesses must start learning about search engine marketing before they even establish an official website or blog. Businesses already existing in the offline world are different because they often come to the Internet without a clue as to how this all works. If you know that marketing online is the key to future business success but aren't quite sure how search engine marketing (SEM) works, this quick guide is for you.

What Can SEM Do for You?

In order to understand the importance of SEM, consider the chain of command that naturally occurs in the online world:

1. Businesses establish websites packed with content and monetization models from which they stand to profit.

2. Individual searchers from all over the world come to the Internet searching for information, products or services like those featured on many business websites.

3. Searchers do not know the URL addresses for the businesses that will deliver what they need, so they go to the search engines like Google or Bing and type in search terms identifying the type of information they need.

4. Search engines constantly crawl websites and all new pages added to websites in order to identify what they are about. This way they can deliver a list of relevant websites that deliver the information those searchers are after. This is how a search engine meets the needs of their customer (the searchers).

5. Businesses are ranked by the search engines depending on their value in terms of complicated rules set by the search engines. The best ranked sites will appear first in the search engine results pages (SERPs) while spam sites are completely eliminated from the list when discovered.

6. Searchers use the SERPs delivered for their search terms to determine which websites to click on. If they find what they need they no longer need to search. If they are not happy with what they find or need additional information they go back to the SERP and click other recommended sites.

SEM is crucial to a business website because it is what gets businesses linked to on the SERPs. If you aren't listed high on these search engine listings you are not going to be found by many people. This means low website traffic which means low profits for your business.

SEM gets your business website found so you can effectively reach your target market online. Without this, you might as well stick with offline advertising.

The Root of SEM

Keywords are the root of all SEM strategies. Searchers type in key terms when they need to find information and those terms become keywords that are matched to website content to create those search engine results page listings. In order to be picked up and matched to the correct searchers, you have to use the right keywords within your website.

How you get those keywords into your website and linked to your website from other sites is called search optimization, or SEO. Learning about this is essential for anyone marketing online. This is definitely the starting point if you don't know anything at all about SEM.

Your brick and mortar business can definitely get ahead of the competition with a good website and the right search engine marketing strategy.

Cheow Yu Yuan is the co-founder of OOm, an online marketing agency providing SEM service.

Find out more about SEM at OOm Singapore.

Please feel free to republish this article on your website, or distribute it to your friends or clients, as long as you leave the resource box intact.

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