Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

Having your website listed by Google (or any other large search engine) is great. When you type in the URL of your website and find it listed at the top of the search results you can be forgiven for congratulating yourself. Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean you’ll wake up the next morning with millions of new customers.

If you developed your website to sell rare stamps from a particular region of the world, for example, you might type the word “stamps” into Google. It'd be reasonable to expect to find your website listed in the results. Google lists almost 13 million results for a search on the word 'stamps'. At 10 a page, thats almost 1.3 million pages. And a new website will begin life towards the bottom of that list.

In the UK the first page of the list on a search for “stamps” would include the Royal Mail website. There would also be several websites with names like ‘allworldstamps.com’ and ‘stampsforsale.com’. And, of course, there’d be ‘stamps.ebay.co.uk. How do they get there? The answer is ‘relevance’. These are the most popular and most relevant websites on the internet selling stamps. They are the pinnacle of your competition. Or are they?

For the benefit of this example, let's assume you're selling rare stamps from Lithuania. A search including the words 'rare', 'stamps' and 'Lithuania' (in any order) will return a list of around 250,000. Not only is this a smaller number to compete with but also, people searching on this combination of words are more likely to be interested in your stock.

Just like offline marketing, there are many things you can do to get your website noticed by the right search engine users. This is not arcane knowledge. Its just a matter of knowing the online marketplace and coming up with the right ideas.

Before you plan your online marketing campaign, contact us to see how you can benefit from our experience.

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