Search Marketing Services
Ever wondered how Siri knows what response to give when you ask about a particular business or service need? It’s all about search engine marketing. To tackle search as part of your marketing strategy, you need a strong digital marketing agency (or full-service agency) with experience and tacticians that can drive results.
Companies that are looking to increase their website visibility in search engine results often resort to hiring professionals for help. These experts can offer search engine optimization and other tactics that help increase search engine visibility and reach more potential customers. Utilizing the right services from these professionals can not only create a more meaningful presence in search engine results, but leave you with a more efficient and effective website as well. With the dynamic timeline of digital marketing, it’s important to stay up to date with best practices for optimizing your website. Our digital team has extensive experience in this space and can help you even through highly regulated industries or difficult competition in the search marketing space.
What is Search Engine Marketing (SEM)?
Search engine marketing is simply the marketing efforts used put forth to promote your organization through search engines. Roughly 8.5 BILLION searches are completed daily in Google alone. This does not include all of the searches completed on other websites ranging from Amazon to Youtube!
When those searches are conducted, search marketing efforts allow you to appear in those search results. Why does that matter? Because this increases your business or organization’s visibility across the web, which in turn, generates sales, new partners, or more website visits.
There are two primary ways to implement search engine marketing efforts: search engine optimization (SEO) or pay-per-click (PPC) advertising (also known as CPC advertising).
Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization (or SEO for short) is the act of implementing certain digital marketing tactics to influence search engines to rank content so that more users see it in the search engine’s organic search listing. These are not paid ads, but simply garnering trust from Google so that they see value in your business or organization’s website. Sounds simple? Well, it’s not.
In the early days of SEO, ranking was easy. Early search algorithms simply looked for webpages that included the keyword multiple times and looked for websites that had a lot of other website’s that linked back to the site. So, they used both keyword density and popularity as the primary measures to determine who ranked at the top of each page.
Now, search algorithms are built to consider thousands of factors ranging from keyword use, page structure, backlinks, site usability, mobile site speed, engaging design, video, expertise, experience, authority, trust, and more. To consistently rank highly for keywords and topics related to your organization, it requires ongoing effort and constant modification to search engine marketing services and strategies. And, honestly, it sometimes means that a different strategy is needed for each individual key topic that is relevant for your organization.
All of the strategies that are implemented by Forum’s digital marketing team are based on your organization’s goals and your customers’ needs. Every keyword search is different and users expect different outcomes. Someone searching for a location should be provided as such, and, someone searching for a particular service should be provided service listings and pages as well. Our goal is to meet the user / customer where they are, while at the same time ensuring that our efforts met best practices AND are considered in line with Google’s – and others – Terms of Service.
At Forum, our team is constantly evaluating strategies and determining the “next best” methods to ensure your organization is recognized by search engines in a way that is equitable and representative of your organization. We develop and implement digital marketing solutions that best fit your organization’s needs and the current algorithms used by search engines.
Understanding Intent
In addition to an understanding of SEO principles – whether technical SEO, on-page SEO or off-page SEO – marketers also have to effectively understand a user’s intent.
When you complete a search for “HVAC company near me,” what is the user searching for? Clearly, an HVAC company near them. But, why? Likely because they need a service or new system. However, if someone searches for “Lennox HVAC system,” what is the intent? They are likely searching to learn more about Lennox systems because they are considering purchasing a new system OR they have one and have questions.
Users typically have 3 different types of intent: they want to “know” something, they want to “go” somewhere, they want to “do” something, or they want to “buy” something. SEO, as well as pay-per-click advertising, are all related to understanding intent. Experienced SEM agencies understand how to leverage intent in order to drive awareness, consideration or sales / conversions for an organization.
Secondary SEO Opportunities
Typically, for those that understand SEO, it’s easy to think solely of primary search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo! and others. However, other platforms ranging from Pinterest and Youtube to Amazon all are built on search algorithms. Optimizing for these platforms is another tactic in an SEO agency’s toolbox and something we can implement for you. Marketing efforts, even social media marketing, have their place in efforts for SEO as well.
Pay-Per-Click Advertising
Whether Amazon or Google, Pay-Per-Click Advertising (also referred to as Cost-Per-Click (CPC) Advertising) is another method to garner visibility in search engines. Through this method, you “pay per click” every time someone visits the promoted webpage. There are pros and cons to this sort of strategy, but if you can drive the right results or volume of conversions, PPC advertising can be highly valuable.
And, just like SEO, PPC has changed drastically over the past few years. Where search engines now focus on new algorithms to give their users accurate results, PPC platforms allow for new media types to be used and effectively use artificial intelligence and machine learning to help best optimize your performance and drive results. These tools allow for new dynamically-generated campaigns, responsive campaigns and even automation of conversion rate optimization in some scenarios.
PPC advertising is available on a variety of platforms ranging from Google search, Google Shopping, Youtube, Amazon, Bing, and more. Understanding your customer’s audience is critical to ensure that you, or your SEM company, select the right tools and targets to drive success.
Building an SEM Campaign For You
There are a lot of digital marketing agencies out there. Some are experienced in digital marketing strategy, while others are startups with a focus on social media. Building meaningful digital marketing strategies that can utilize all the tools provided by the web takes skill and understanding of the platform’s and the results that they can provide. Forum’s team is lead by search engine marketing experts with significant experience in the digital space. They have developed hundreds of search engine marketing campaigns over the course of their individual careers and have driven success for Forum clients.
We can build the right search marketing campaign for your organization as well. Whether you’re seeking a search engine marketing agency only, rebuilding your website, or a full suite of traditional and online marketing services, Forum is more than happy to assist your organization on your marketing journey.