Search Engine Marketing - worth understanding the jargon?

In this article Lauren Mackelden delves into the world of Search Engine Marketing (SEM), and finds that it has grown at a huge rate due to the great returns on investment

How much do you know about Search Engine Marketing? Understanding the jargon could really be worth your while even though it may seem daunting.   Experts in this field have kindly simplified this complex subject for us.

Nathan Wood, SEO Manager, 4MAT explains how it all started: “SEM (Search Engine Marketing) is not a recent phenomenon. The rapid growth of the web in the late 1990s gave birth to perhaps the defining technology of the modern online age – the search engine. Numerous big brands such as Yahoo, Google, Ask Jeeves, MSN appeared, and search became the Net’s latest buzz. Originally these engines would provide free search results, and they developed complicated algorithms to provide the most relevant and, they claimed, authoritative results possible. This organic search solution, utilising markers within pages and external factors such as link strength remains at the core of the 4 major search engines. However, in order to finance their growing business operations, the search engines have developed numerous advertising solutions to sit alongside their organic  search results - paid inclusion, paid placement, and pay per click listings as they are commonly referred to.

The purpose of SEM is the same as any other marketing activity – to increase the exposure of your business to a target audience. There are many different aspects of SEM, but the two most significant are search engine optimization (SEO) and pay per click advertising (PPC). The main difference between both of these is that SEO targets organic
search listings only, and PPC targets the paid listings results. SEO and PPC adopt inherently different strategies and methodologies, but both are concerned with the same underlying philosophies of targeting a specific audience through the use of content and keyword research and providing relevant information quickly and easily.”

Kelvin Newman of Site Visibility Incorporated by AI Digital, tells us why it is so popular: “Everyone would like more potential candidates to visit their site, but you don’t want just anyone, you want people looking to apply for jobs now. If someone is searching they are showing a desire which you’d be mad not to take advantage of. SEM has grown at a huge rate because the companies that have invested have seen great returns on their investment. It’s also given new start ups or smaller players a chance to compete on a level playing field without the bigger budget more traditional marketing required.  People expect your website to rank for generic terms, it doesn’t  matter how successful your branding, offline advertising or other types of promotion is, if they search for your keyword and you’re not there, they are going to look elsewhere.” Alison M. Engelsman, Senior Strategist at Shaker Recruitment Advertising & Communications says: “Overall, job seekers are leaning on search engines more than ever to help them in their job search. Just alone, the word ‘jobs’ is searched over 25,000 times daily on search engines (Wordtracker.com). Additional importance also resides on SEM as a method to drive traffic to a company’s corporate web site. In recruitment, a company’s career site is the cornerstone in an overall recruitment strategy. Not only is this the main communication platform for discussing employment opportunities, but also a forum to ‘sell’ the company and explain the hiring process. According to the Annual Sources of Hire Study by CareerXRoads, out of the total hires attributed to job boards, 54% of  those hires came from a company’s career site. As such, SEM represents an effective model for increasing potential applicant flow directly to a company’s career site on a PPC basis in which companies only pay for interested parties. Shaker feels that this trend will continue as companies restructure their recruitment campaigns to engage a more active audience outside of a reliance on job boards, as well as honing in on methods to target the passive jobseeker, which can be accomplished via SEM by carefully selecting keywords whose inference could lend to recruitment or a potential applicant’s lifestyle.”

Adele Poole, MD of HotLizard explains the differences between SEM and SEO: “Search Engine Marketing differs from Search Engine Optimisation in that it is basically paid for listings in the search engines such as using Google Adwords or services such as Miva which work across multiple search engines. Lots of companies use it where they are trying to get top search engine positioning for competitive terms or where they can’t achieve natural rankings due to their website infrastructure. It can also be used effectively to support a search engine optimisation strategy, where paid for listings seem to help increase natural positioning and also to support tactical recruitment campaigns where immediate positioning is essential.”

Effective use of SEM

“SEM is complicated and you really want your PPC to compliment your SEO”, says Kelvin Newman. He says: “That way you’re not giving Google any more money than you need to and you can use your PPC to make sure you’re not optimizing your website for the wrong job related terms. The best SEM agencies are truly transparent about what they are offering, so you can see how your investment is affecting your bottom line. This open-ness is good for two reasons; one it helps you avoid paying over the odds, secondly it also means many firms are willing to offer lower fees with performance based charges. So you only pay if your company is getting real value from SEM.” Alison M. Engelsman says there are multitudes of “best practice” strategies, “Depending on a company’s set goals for an SEM campaign different tactics can be used to optimize the campaign’s performance in reaching those goals. SEM isn’t a form of advertising that leans on a ‘set it and forget it’ mentality; it is fluid and dynamic in nature. SEM campaigns require constant monitoring, testing and trending to be highly effective. Some optimization strategies that Shaker utilizes in maximizing a client’s SEM campaign performance are: revising creative to improve relevancy, testing various ads against each other to enhance CTR (click thru rate), expanding or decreasing keyword lists depending on the target audience and performance, carefully selecting key-word settings (i.e. exact, broad, phrase, etc.), choosing appropriate geo targeting, adjusting bids for competitive ranking and maximized visibility, monitoring ad position with performance, utilizing tracking software to measure post-click activity, landing page/content testing, and the list goes on.”

Adele Poole advises: “Maximising budgets in SEM is essential as it can be an expensive exercise. Careful selection of keywords is essential as the most competitive are usually the most expensive e.g. jobs in finance, retail jobs but they are not necessarily the most effective in driving quality traffic to your website. Looking at more specific but less expensive terms can be a good strategy. The volumes of visitors may be smaller but they can be of a higher quality and cost you less and therefore provide a much better return on investment.” Nathan Wood agrees, saying: “Search behaviour and search engine usage can easily be segmented into smaller and smaller sections, depending on how detailed you want to be. A search query is nothing more than a request for information, or a demonstrated need if you will. Some searchers look for ‘jobs’, others for ‘jobs in London’; some look for ‘engineering jobs’, and others look for ‘C++ programmer vacancies in Skegness’. Search is about people and their individual needs and desires, and these become transparent in their search behaviour. This is the major benefit of SEM over any other type of marketing. SEM can target those people who are specifically interested in the service that you have to offer. The ability to selectively target your efforts in this way means that every penny of your marketing budget is spent on attracting people who have already demonstrated a need for your services.”

Strategies to avoid

Kelvin Newman advises: “Avoid any company who talks of paid links, they might help you rank in the short term but Google have been brutal with their treatment of the websites both buying and selling links, you’re not a fly by night company and neither should be your marketing. The best SEM takes time and effort; anyone who has a ‘system’ or ‘network’ that they use to promote your site is at best wasting your money or potentially putting the stability of your business at risk.” Adele Poole says where they use Search Engine Marketing for clients it tends to be as part of a much broader strategy to generally improve their rankings and positioning rather than an end in itself. She thinks: “That a lot of users of search engines these days are quite savvy to where the paid for listings are and can perceive, rightly or wrongly, that because they are paid for they are of lower quality or less relevant than those in the natural listings and can perversely work against you. It is an expensive way of driving traffic and we would prefer to work with clients to get top engine positioning through good web site technology and optimisation strategies to try and reduce their advertising spend.”

Alison M. Engelsman thinks the biggest mistake advertisers make is being too general in their keyword selection saying, “In recruitment, a company might think ‘jobs’ or ‘employment’ should be added to their keyword list. They are on the right track but you have to think more specifically. Another strategy that should be avoided is not tracking an SEM campaign thoroughly. Metrics are a vital tool for any online advertiser. Tracking technology is able to provide a variety of data for measuring the success or failure of any campaign.”

The future’s bright
- the future’s SEM

Alison M. Engelsman also says SEM is constantly evolving with how companies can refine and enhance their strategies. She says: “For instance, relevancy ranking is playing a larger role now on ad positioning, and for advertisers, results in increased emphasis on creative and strategy. The next step for search engine marketing will be an evolution into a Pay Per Action model. Already in beta on Google, advertisers will be able to develop complex strategies to guide a search user into performing an action on their website and then only pay for the volume of users who have completed this task. I think what is most interesting is how the search engines themselves will be able to continue to update their algorithms to include more content such as social media and then shift to the mobile format. Google has already launched Universal Search but as the web continues to grow and new types of content develop, the search engines will need to evolve in order to be able to index appropriately. Since SEM relies on advertising in the search results, as the search engines evolve, the platform in which advertisers are currently accustomed to could change. Overall, search is an integral component to navigating the web so I am optimistic that SEM will continue to be an effective advertising option for companies.”

Looking ahead, Adele Poole believes: “There will always be a market for SEM but I would hope that it becomes a much broader concept, in that companies look at more creative ways of advertising their services over the Internet other than just the search engines. This is already happening with advertising placement on social networking sites but there are masses of other opportunities for advertising that haven’t been exploited as yet and it may be that the search engines themselves become more creative with the advertising opportunities available.” Kelvin Newman also suggests new possibilities: “SEM is increasingly becoming reliant on the overall quality of your site; expect more PPC agencies to start making recommendations to how your internal search works, or the team working on your SEO to help you create a blog or podcast. All the major search engines are beginning to include content like pictures and videos prominently in their search results, it’s still early days with these technologies but they will soon become an important way to gain or cement a share of search traffic.”

The rationale for SEM is shown by Nathan Wood, who says: “Google announced in January 2008 that the average number of words per query now sits at a shade under 4 words. Searchers know that in order to find the most relevant information in the quickest time possible they need to be more specific in their requests. Searchers are demonstrating that they want more relevant information. Only a SEM campaign will help you address this need.”