17 August, 2011

The Search Engine Marketing Option for SMEs

If you're an SME in Malaysia and looking for a cost-effective way to give your business a boost, you should probably consider Online Marketing. Compared with traditional print, tv, radio and OOH advertising, Online Marketing provides much better targeting, is measurable and way cheaper.

Production costs is also much lower because there are no physical prints and videos to produce. This also means that you can get your ads out quicker with Online Marketing.

Online Marketing has evolved tremendously over the years, from just simple banner advertising to a sophisticated array of tools. Today, one has the option of email marketing (EDMs), pop-ups and pop-overs, social media marketing, article marketing and search engine marketing.

What is Search Engine Marketing? Search Engine Marketing or SEM, is an umbrella word for all methods that are used to promote websites in the search engines, e.g. in the search results of Google, Yahoo and Bing.

There are two main methods in SEM - Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay-per-Click (PPC) advertising programs that are offered by the search engines themselves. SEO helps increase your website's visibility in the organic part of the search results (i.e. the left side), while PPC lets you place your ads under the Sponsored Ads areas (i.e. top and right side).

Between the two, SEO is more important because based on a number of studies, organic search results receive about 75% of the click distribution compared to 25% for sponsored ads. This can be attributed to 2 main reasons:

1. People apparently trust the organic results more because the positions are determined by Google based on a number of quality signals.

2. A big portion of users have developed some sort of "ad-blindness" which makes them look only at the organic search results.

Still PPC advertising shouldn't be neglected because it provides better certainty than SEO and lets you push your message out as quickly as within the hour. Unlike SEO, PPC also doesn't incur high upfront costs and you can stop your campaigns anytime when you feel that it has stop giving you a good ROI.