Welcome to search engine marketing. In this presentation, we're going to discuss how search engine marketing relates with digital marketing. Imagine you have a brick-and-mortar store, and it has a beautiful store front, and you're proud of the store. But it happens to be on the street that doesn't get a lot of traffic, that will affect your sales. Now, the same holds true for a website. If the website cannot be found by prospects, that will definitely affect the businesses performance. But let's look at digital marketing versus traditional marketing strategies. First of all, there are some key similarities and they involve how the business is, how we segment our market, and how we position our products and services, and how we promote them. Those are similarities between digital and traditional marketing strategies, but there are some major differences and one of them is that, in traditional marketing strategies, it's about pushing products and it's about reach. How many customers or prospects can we reach at one time? With digital marketing reach is important as well. But the main difference is that, in digital marketing, it's about a two-way communication between the business and its prospects and we call that engagement. But let's look at some key elements of digital marketing and they typically involve all the things that are listed here to social media, the advertising, paid ads, SEO, which we're going to talk a lot about later, search engine optimization. The website itself, we'll be discussing conversion marketing and that has to do with word of mouth, and that has to do with review sites as well. Email marketing, CRM, or customer relationship management and are we mobile device ready with our platforms? Now let's look at the concept of search engine marketing. Why is it important? Well, if you look at SEM, which we will be calling it through the rest of the presentation, how it relates to the consumer buying process. You'll see the importance of it. There's a five stages to the consumer buying process. The first one is problem recognition and we'll let just say that your problem is your iPad, or let's just say your laptop computer broke. You've got the blue screen of death. That's a problem, right? You need to try to solve that problem. The first thing you're going to do is you're going to information seek. This is where search engine marketing or SEM comes into play. Why it's so important? Because without SEM, without a good ranking for your website, your customers are not going to or your prospects are not going to place you in the information seeking area. So you'll miss out on that and then you won't be part of the comparing alternatives or evaluation of options or finally, making the purchase. You want to be part of the information seeking stage, and that's where you would research that the various types of laptops and make your decision. First of all, search engine marketing is the head term here and then underneath SEM, we have search engine optimization called SEO or pay-per-click, which is PPC. In this example, you're looking at a firm, a company, that sells floor covering. On the left you see the organically placed ranked placement of their company in a web search and then on the right, you have a placement as well. However, you see the ad insignia on the entry on the right. That means that they had paid to be placed at the top of the search. We call that pay-per-click and that is a strategy. Is it the right strategy? It really depends on what we're doing. But there are two strategies. The one on the left again is an organic placement and the one on the right is a paid placement and we will be showing you those in a couple slides. The key difference between SEO, search engine optimization, and pay-per-click, PPC is that with SEO, let's start at the top. It is basically organic. The website is placed there because it's a quality website, it's got the right use of keywords, all those things which we will be talking about. It takes time for the results to work and take effect. SEO does not happen overnight, it's a long process. To improve the website's searchability and doing the right strategies, it takes time. It is gradual. It requires consistent work. It's not set it and forget it if you will. Then there's a residual benefit that once you've designed your SEO properly, then the website will be visible. It's not something you have to work on every day. There's no escrow or money put into it like pay-per-click. With pay-per-click, after you set it up through Google AdWords and you've purchased the keywords, the results are almost instantaneous, but it does require management. The budget that you set up might be spent very quickly and that's where the cost of it can go up. Then, once the bank is empty or the escrow is empty, you set up with Google AdWords, the account. The results will immediately stop. In this slide, we show in the previous slide, a couple of slides ago we had an ad or a PPC placement, and we had an organic placement. This particular search for the branded keyword Coles Fine Flooring, which is what this business is. You'll notice that they've got a ad, and they've got an organic placement concurrently. They do that because they want to lock some of their competition out. There are some facts that you need to be aware of and that is that for an ad, even though this is at the very top of the page, a lot of consumers are concerned about clicking on ads. In other words, if somebody is clicking, if a consumer is looking for Coles Fine Flooring, they put that in the search bar, there are only 20 percent of the audience or the prospects who will click on this placement for the ad, the one on the bottom,30-40 percent will. That's because there's more credibility in an organically placed rank website. That's something that I want you to keep in mind. Here are some statistics to back that up with SEO, search engine optimization, and why it's so important. Ninety-three percent of all online experiences begin with the search engine. It could be Google, it could be other search engines. Google happens to control about 95 percent of searches, at least in the US. Seventy-five percent of users never scroll past page 2. That's a very important fact that you want to be on the first page. A lot of prospects will not go past the first page. Seventy to Eighty percent ignore the paid ads. That was the one I showed you on the previous slide. Organic research is important and that's why. Now let's really focus on SEO, search engine optimization. It's broken down into two areas. They're controllable areas. We have on-page and off-page strategies. Both are important. On on-page strategy, that's the obvious one. We want to have good content marketing there. We want to have the right keywords, and we want to research our keywords ahead of time. We'll be talking about now on the next slide. We want to have images that are clear that that load quickly and the page speed has to be good. Otherwise, the audience will become less patient, and they could click off the site. Again, on-page SEO involves optimizing content and all the things, the elements that you would do on the page. But there's something called off-page SEO. That's where you try to get other websites to link to your website. That actually reflects to Google. Let's just say that we'll use Google for now. Google looks at that as quality, because it sees that links are pointing to your website, and what that tells Google is that, your website is in authority. You are blogging and you've got guest blogging and social media is off page. If you have really effective social media with a lot of followers, that can affect your SEO from off the page. Off-page SEO involves any activity to drive awareness and refer traffic to your site from other sites. It might be your own social media but that's considered another site. Both of these put together, on-page and off-page SEO lead to better ranking for your website, and that's the key. Now, we're going to look at keywords because keywords are important. If you want to be found for a certain keyword in different examples but on that floor covering site I shown you, they want to be found for the term floor covering. Although that it's not what we were searching for them before, but floor covering is important. That's a keyword they need to be recognized for. They need to place that within their website in a fairly frequent manner but not overusing it. That's why you want to use the keywords, why they're important. You also might purchase keywords through Google AdWords. Then if you do that, then that's where the PPC, your pay-per-click comes into play. Now, there's something called the head or short-tailed keywords, middle tail, and long keywords. What this chart shows us is that the higher you are up to scale with a short keyword, like for example, shoes or women's shoes, that would have a very high search volume. But there's a downside to it. There's a low conversion rate if you look along the lower horizontal axis. Why? Because there's so much competition for that, so you have a low conversion rate for that. That means as far as actual purchases. In middle tail keywords that are a bit longer, you have less search volume but probably a higher conversion rate. Then on long-tailed keywords on the bottom of the chart, it shows you that you've got lower search volume for it but a higher conversion rate. You want to try to use short and long-tailed keywords concurrently. Here's an example, if you want to talk about a random topic like bed sheets. Bed sheets would be a short keyword and that would be on the very top. It would have a lot of competition from a lot of retailers online and brick-and-mortar, and you'd have a low conversion rate but there's a lot of volume. But what if you've used the keyword bed sheets that keep you cool? That's a long-tailed keyword. You'd have quotation marks around the whole thing. If anyone look for that online, if they searched for bed sheets that keep you cool, if you were selling bed sheets and that was your long-tailed keyword, you'd have a very high chance of conversion because very few other retailers would show up for that bed sheets that keep you cool. That's the power of a long-tailed keyword. Lastly, there are sites that you can go to that can help you look at any website. This is a free site. If you go to this and you put this in your search bar, it's going to ask you for a website. You put in any website, it will actually score it for you. It will give you some scores. One is, it will look at your on-page SEO, and it's going to look at links. This particular website doesn't have any links pointing back to it. That's off-page SEO. They not have done a good job there, they need to correct that. Usability is okay, performance is okay. Social media is good. So it gives you like a radar chart that helps explain that. Thank you for your attention. This concludes the presentation on search engine marketing.
