Search Engine Marketing and Optimisation

SEM or Search Engine Marketing is intended to maximise the ROI of your web presence. This can be achieved through a combination of optimising your site so that it is found naturally by search engines and paid search advertising for carefully targeted keywords and phrases.

Firstly, consider natural or organic searches, which is cheap (i.e. free!) and remains the most popular way of finding pages. It is generally accepted that if you are not listed in the first three pages of the search results, you won’t be found by a prospect, so it is important to optimise your site so that the different search engines’ algorithms all rate your pages highly for your chosen keywords (i.e. those important to your target audience).

An alternative is paid searches, where you pay to be listed in search engine results for specific search phrases or keywords (examples would be paying for Google AdWords or Overture Premium Listings). It is obviously highly important to maximise the return on the money you spend on paid searches as budgets can quickly be used up by acquiring inappropriate visitors for whom the site has no real interest . This requires tracking visitors, with their search phrases, through return visits to catch those who do not make a purchase on the first visit, so that you can understand which search engines and keywords finally result in profitable business.

Maximum benefit is obtained by a combination of both campaigns, but in both cases it is necessary to measure what is happening in order to fine tune your site and your marketing spend.

Organic results, pay-per-click, bid management, adwords, keywords, paid inclusion - managing search engines is a complicated science. Webtrends makes it easier to identify how to best invest your time and money on search engines, by allowing you to distinguish between organic and paid search results, drill down into results by search engine and search phrase and integrate your cost data with your web data for complete ROI analysis. Webtrends can be used to provide reports such as:

• Sales by Search Engine so that you can measure conversion, as measured by revenue, average order values and total order values or simply by visitor if you are seeking registrants
• Purchase Conversion Funnel by Search Phrase so that you can see which phrases perform the best and what the drop-offs are
• Retention by Search Engine so that you can determine which search engines and phrases generate the most valuable and loyal visitors

All of these reports may be run for “paid”, “natural” or “both” activities so that you have the information required to determine the most appropriate mix for your site.

See Webtrends 8 in action in the quick tour and learn how to measure and optimise your own search engine marketing efforts, download one of our White papers to see how you can harness the power of search marketing by measuring your paid and organic search campaigns.