A great website without any traffic is like the world’s best shop without any customers. The quest for traffic – and specifically for relevant traffic – is absolutely essential in determining the success of your website.
Search marketing is about making sure your site is there when it needs to be, when people are looking for the product or service you can provide them. There are two core disciplines within the catch-all description of search marketing (often abbreviated to SEM, or search engine marketing) – pay-per-click advertising and seach engine optimisation.
Pay per click advertising (PPC)
Pay-per-click campaigns can be extremely powerful, providing site owners with the opportunity to place a highly-targeted message alongside specific search queries. As the name implies, advertisers only pay when potential customers click on your ad, which can make PPC an extremely cost-effective advertising tool - if you have the resources and expertise to set up and manage your campaigns properly.
Given the simplicity of the model, it is no surprise that PPC has become increasingly competitive in recent years. Increased bidding on keywords increases the price of PPC activity, and monitoring the effectiveness of complex campaigns made up of many thousands of keywords can quickly become overwhelming.
Our search marketing team can advise, set up and manage PPC campaigns to help you make the most of your marketing spend. All members of the team have passed the Qualified Google Advertising Professional examination, and Zone is a recognised Google Adwords Qualified company.
Search engine optimisation (SEO)
Search engine optimisation is the process of tweaking your website so it appears higher in the free, organic, list of search results. Search engines chose which sites to return for any given search based on the relevance of that site to the specific keyword or keywords – so the challenge is to try and make your site the most relevant source of information around the search terms which will deliver the most relevant traffic.
Search engine optimisation is a catch-all term covering a wide range of technical, design and content considerations. But the key thing to bear in mind is that search engines are looking for relevant content – and the best way to improve your organic search performance is to ensure your site provides an authoritative source of regularly updated and highly-relevant content.
Search engine spiders use in-bound links - other people linking to your website - as a way of ranking the quality of your content. Link building - the process of setting up in-bound links from third-party websites - is one of the most important aspects of SEO, and creating content which can easily be shared via social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter is a powerful way of generating relevant inbound links.
Our experienced search team work closely alongside technical and creative experts on both new design and build projects and ongoing SEO consultancy. We can also call upon Zone’s unrivalled expertise and resources to produce the engaging and relevant content which lies at the heart of effective search engine marketing.