February 2004

Search Engine Marketing - the bigger picture

The term 'Search Engine Optimisation' (or SEO), is the term which has been used for optimising a website to make it search engine 'friendly', and boost the search rankings of a website. However, 'Search Engine Marketing' (or SEM - don't say it too quickly!) has become the more mainstream term, since it's about more than just optimising a website.

Danny Sullivan coined the term back at the end of 2001 (which you can read in this article at Clickz and again here), and has been using it ever since to describe search engine optimisation in a much broader sense.

So, what is the difference between search engine marketing and search engine optimisation?
As mentioned above, search engine optimisation is the process of making a website search engine 'friendly'. This involves researching your target key phrases that visitors will use to find your website in the search engines, and writing good title tags and meta description tags. These are often shown in the search engines results pages, so need to be well written. The page content is one of the most important aspects of an optimisation. Again, must be well written, encourage your visitors to respond to a call to action, drive the benefits of your product or service and include your key phrases. Once done, the website can be manually submitted to the search engines.

But SEM isn't just about making changes to the web pages themselves. Not only does it involve optimising the website for the traditional search engines, but it can also involve a strategy for paid listings (such as in the pay per click search engines) as well as link building - obtaining quality incoming links from directories and relevant websites.

In the wider sense, SEM actively involves ensuring the website is doing what it is supposed to do, in other words creating leads or sales, offering strong calls to action and converting visitors. It involves usability - it's all very well gaining top results in the search engines, but if the website is not user-friendly, those results are as good as useless. Furthermore, the search engine marketing strategy should be integrated within the overall online and general marketing strategy of a business, not just seen in isolation.

Look at the bigger picture
If you're responsible for the company's website, think about it in the broadest sense. A search engine marketing strategy will pay far greater rewards than just having the site optimised - which on its own won't do much for your results.

Ensuring your website is seen by qualified prospects, time and time again, is an ongoing, active process. As one marketer put in response to Danny's change from SEO to SEM, "Search engine marketing fits the bill these days more appropriately than SEO. As Danny pointed out, SEO only refers to crawler optimisation, whereas search engine marketing refers to what we do on all the search engines -- market a particular site! We consider ourselves online marketers and within that comes search engine marketing", which sums it up perfectly.

So are you really putting your heart into 'marketing' your website or just happy to optimise it and hope for the best? If not, start now - 'tis the month for passion so show a bit for your search marketing strategy and you'll be reaping rewards in the months to come.

Next month I'll be discussing how search marketing is only one part of online marketing, and what else should be in there as part of the total mix.