15 Feb Why Your Business Should Spend Money on Search Engine Marketing

As an entrepreneur it’s important to spend your dollars wisely in an effort to grow your site traffic and potentially your business.

There are several different avenues you can venture down such as social media, display marketing, email, offline, SEO and SEM. All of these have merit being in your marketing plan, with search engines being the source of the most intent driven audience possible. The only time this audience will find you is when they are actively looking for something like “hair dresser in Surry Hills” or “digital marketing in Sydney”. The searcher has a need they are looking to fulfil or a question they need answering and as such will be highly engaged when they find the result they need. Making it critical that you are on the first page to be seen and clicked on. Let’s face it, you can’t get clicks when you sit on page 4, people just don’t have the patience to trawl through that many results. If Google or Bing don’t return what they are looking for on the first page, they are more likely to refine their search with something more specific to find what they were looking for.

SEO and SEM are the keys to getting into this audience’s door.

From a cost perspective Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the cheaper of the two, but is much more of a slow burn process which can drive great results long term. Content generation, site architecture, linking strategy and many other elements go into turning your website into a well-oiled machine which is optimised for both the user experience and is SEO friendly. This should definitely be a focus for the website, otherwise you aren’t maximising its potential.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is the paid equivalent to driving search users to your website. The upside to running a PPC campaign is that the setup to launch can be turned around quickly with ads going live after posting moments earlier. Meaning you can go from no traffic to hundreds of new users per day, dependent on budgets of course. Plus you only pay for the clicks which lead to your website, if 1,000 people see your ad and don’t click you exposed your brand to a large pool of people who didn’t find your ad useful. In that case you would probably need to tweak your ads to improve the engagement. But the key here is you dictate what to show for in the search results and how much you are willing to pay for that click along with which keywords you want to focus on, tying this in with conversion tracking you can see results quickly and can start optimising towards a more cost effective campaign.

From our experience we have even seen established sites with decent revenue volumes experience spikes in conversions and revenue using highly targeted and relevant SEM campaigns. This client saw a gradual increase by adding a paid search campaign in July to their marketing mix with close to 2x increase in revenue within the first 3 months.

SEM Revenue Growth

So whilst this will cost you more money than optimising your site for SEO, the results from a paid search campaign are evident. Driving relevant traffic, engaged users and potential sales within minutes of launching. We recommend doing both paid and organic together to maximise share of voice and provide 2 effective revenue streams.

If you are interested in finding out more, contact us today.