The benefits of search engine marketing - BusinessLIVE

Search engine marketing (SEM), search engine optimisation (SEO) and search engine advertising (SEA) are strategy and pitch document mainstays because people understand that they're an essential part of the digital marketing mix. But they don't often grasp their individual power.

Effectively, SEO and SEA form part of search engine marketing, which is the essential toolkit any tactical digital marketer should be using. Google has control of more than the lion's share of search traffic in South Africa, meaning it's rightly the focal platform for many online marketers.

Online marketing differs from historic marketing only in terms of the huge amount of data that can be gleaned from analytics that track almost every aspect of online interaction. The fundamentals remain the same – like moving a prospect through the sales funnel. When a customer is looking for a product online, their foot is already in the entrance of the funnel. We know that they've been drawn to a product by a need or an awareness – and SEA helps a primed business fulfil that need. Any business operating in the online space – and that should be every business – needs to assume that their competitors are doing the same and needs to take SEA seriously as a result. If they don't, they risk falling behind. If a customer already has their foot in the entrance and is staring down the funnel, why wouldn't you want your business to be a ranked option for them as they take the next step?

Because we're able to target an audience that is already in the buying funnel by everything from the keywords they used to the time of day they're searching and the kind of device they searched from, marketers using SEA can gain fascinating insights into consumer behaviour, which in turn informs the type of content the business uses.

It also give marketers instant visibility by using Google Adwords. Whereas SEO takes a long time to realise results – excellent though they may be – Adwords gives us the ability to get the most out of a marketing budget by switching out ad collateral, A/B testing content and starting or stopping a campaign at will. It's also instant – switch the ad on and it's visible immediately.

The Holy Grail

The real magic, of course, comes in when great SEM and SEO combine to deliver the Holy Grail of "owning the whole page", where a brand's product or service leads in both paid and organic sections of the search results page. Google is in the business of helping people find what they're looking for, so if a company's product or service is optimised better than that of competitors against keywords and ad targeting, it will rise in the rankings because of its relevance.

Proper SEM also drastically increases relevant traffic to a site and boosts organic rankings. Some businesses run social media ads and banners and draw in customers with great creative, but once the customer has clicked through, they discover the content isn't relevant. In that instance, the path between the ad and the website is controlled by the business doing the advertising. When a properly run SEM informs organic rankings it means that Google is controlling the landing page, improving the chance of the result being relevant. When a customer searches for something, the term should bring up a relevant ad and organic ranking, which will increase traffic to the website because customers trust the link they're clicking on.

SEM Specifics

Industries which are highly regulated – like the pharmaceutical industry and the legal profession – can benefit from SEM. A pharmaceutical producer may not be able to put up banner ads for its product on a mainstream website, but the product can rank organically if the right content is deployed in the right way. Putting out content that results in a higher organic ranking brings that product top of mind – in a way, it's advertising without advertising.

No business can see the label from the inside of the bottle – but an outsourced partner has that ability. Digital agencies can give insights into what the business's target market is searching for, when and how, in everyday language – rather than the company's internal terminology.  A mastery of all the Google tools helps, too. You wouldn't ask Bob in the payroll department if he can nip down and unblock a drain in the canteen, you'd call a plumber. When you're putting your online reputation on the line, call a specialist.

Jacques Du Bruyn is the MD of Flume.

The big take-out: Any business operating in the online space should be taking search engine advertising seriously.