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Search Engine Marketing – an Effective Tool for Marketing

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Search Engine Marketing – an Effective Tool for Marketing

Marketing and advertisement is of foremost importance for any business / company. There are different reasons why companies pursue it. The popular ones include: getting more sales; branding, increase in visibility, and/or market share; or to introduce a new product line or services. According to recent trend branding and positioning is not only limited to offline world, Internet and Search Engines such as Google, Lycos, Yahoo, MSN, AOL etc., also play an important role in achieving this objective.

How does it relate to Internet and Search Engines?

If your product is not right in front of your customer at the respective stores where these products are typically purchased, you can certainly say that you are missing out on sales, market share, and branding. The same concept applies to the Internet and search engines. If your web site doesn’t shows up in the top rankings for your offered services and products in major search engines you can calculate how much business and branding you are missing out on?

SEM is a Combination Art & Science.

According to SEM Experts, Search Engine Marketing is both an art and science. Its goal is to optimize a site’s ability to be found on Internet search engines and directories for the most targeted keywords / phrase by employing various Search Engine Optimization strategies and drive qualified traffic to the web site. This leads to more quality referrals & hence increase in sales.

Search Engines provide Target Traffic.

Search engines are the most widely used means of finding information on the Internet. It provides an effective method of driving highly targeted visitors to your web site. A new study shows that the Web has grown to more than 2.1 billion documents and is growing at the rate of 7 million pages per day. Another study indicates that people who spend five or more hours a week online, spend about 71 percent of their time searching for information. That goes to show that how important are search engines in branding and marketing of products and services through your web site. It is the No.1 way people find your web site.

Positioning your right web site at right place.

If your business’s main product is “fashion garments”, you have undoubtedly positioned your product at most of the department and fashion stores. Following the same suit, SEM Experts position your product/website at the top of the search engine results so when users search for ” fashion garments” roughly 1,500 times daily on the major search engines, your website shows up in the top rankings. Now suppose this campaign is conducted for 8 months (including the maintenance) and there are 1,500 searches a day and your website is seen as #1 daily, the users will begin familiarizing your company / brand name, thus helping in better brand recall and easy sales.

How does it differ from Offline Marketing approach?

With a successful search engine marketing campaign you can accomplish every goal and objective that is sought after with offline marketing and advertising. There are two major differences between offline and online marketing: 1) Marketing your website via search engine marketing, email marketing, banner adv. have proven to be drastically less expensive than their offline equivalents, and 2) Search engine marketing facilitates you to demonstrate your product throughout the world or whichever geographical area you chose but with offline marketing, your marketing and selling efforts are restricted to a particular area in a city or town as the case may be.

Why is Search Engine Marketing more effective?

The ROI for SEM is excellent compared to any other online marketing means, especially when compared to online banner adv., direct mail campaign etc. With SEM, you get better conversion rates, lower cost-per-click, and lower acquisition costs. A study by market intelligence firm NPD Group, say “consumers are five times more likely to purchase products after seeing search listings versus online banner advertisement”. In the same market research report it was found that high search engine listings drive the highest awareness or branding for a website, with consumers recalling websites 60% of the time from search engine listings #1-5, and roughly 20% for online banner adv.

Among the Top search engines, Google is considered to be the major source of referrals for all web sites and the main target of every SEM campaign. It is followed by others major engines and directories such as Lycos, MSN, Yahoo, AOL, AltaVista.

Search Engine Marketing is no trifle task. It is an art and science of applying the knowledge and experience gained over the years researching the search engine’s distinct criteria, unique indexing parameters or algorithm. It requires a calculated approach guided by proven and ethical methodologies to deliver the results.

With usage of Internet increasing in multiple folds in India and abroad, search engine marketing is an effective and appealing means of marketing and advertising to reach your target audience and cannot be ignored. For more Search Engine Marketing

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How to Achieve a Success in Runet? Invest in Search Engine Marketing!

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How to Achieve a Success in Runet? Invest in Search Engine Marketing!

Many people say that search engines are the future of the business. If your company is not present on search engine ranking pages, most probably this will have a major influence on the profits, awareness and competitiveness. We search for business partners, suppliers and services in different ways and languages all over the world. These who are interested in the Eastern Europe market should have necessary pieces of information how to effectively reach through Internet their potential customers e.g. in Russia.

This article presents a summary of how the Russian (the fastest growing population of internauts all over the world according to comScore World Metrix, Jan 2007) look for information. It also explains the advantages of a good exposure in search engine listings in the Russian search engines.

Searching activity in the Russian Internet (known also as Runet) is concentrated in 4 major search engines. These are:

Yandex.ru – with 48,4% of market share;Google – 28,6%;Rambler.ru – 15,9%;Mail.ru – 4,7%;

The other players (Yahoo, MSN, Aport, Meta Bot, Alta Vista and others) take the rest of the market, according to SpyLOG Feb / Mar 2007 stats – http://gs.spylog.ru/r/?reportId=7&categoryId=1.

Business promotes itself in Russia

As a result of intense development of Runet, not only the local SMBs spend money on PPC campaigns but also both international companies of the same size as well as big multinational businesses like General Motors, Nissan, Peugeot, Honda and Sony. In case of these companies, yearly advertising budget is between .5 mln – .5 mln with up to 50% of it being spent on search engine advertising in Yandex.ru.

Search Engine Marketing on the top

Due to the great interest among advertisers, 2006 expenses on search engine promotion in the Russian Internet grew by 150% comparing to year 2005 and reached 0 million. Thus, search engine advertising has beaten banner advertising (with 0 million spendings) first time ever. This should be a very important signal for all the companies which promote themselves online, that SEM activity (a mix of technology and words which allows to reach now more than 90% of internet users) is an optimum way of the promotion (Lenta.ru – http://lenta.ru/news/2007/02/12/advert/).

Optimum costs of promotion

The minimum price for a single click (CPC) in Yandex.ru varies from (depending on the industry) .50 (“stickers”) to .00 (“refridgerators”). In Begun.ru one can pay .00 (“cash terminals”), .70 (“sight correction”), .90 (“companies registration”) and even .20 for “company closure”. The highest prices (.99) are paid for targeted campaigns which take into account very precise parameters, geolocation and time restrictions. You can compare this to 50 – 00 prices of one week banner campaign on popular Russian portals (according to http://www.context.1ps.ru).

Investing money in paid listings should be then cheaper and undoubtedly more efficient. When talking about banners, one pays for impressions, not users’ interest measured by clicks and actions taken on the advertiser’s website. The opposite payment model is assigned to sponsored links – payment is made only for users interested in products and services who click and visit the website.

Competition among advertisers

The highest prices in Yandex.Direct (http://www.direct.yandex.ru) are related to B2B activity, where just one transaction (no matter if it is selling a drilling rig or Boeing) per year make a single click with CPC of .00 affordable. Apart from above-mentioned B2B examples, the most competitive areas of interest are flats’ sale in the modern block of flats, airplane rentals, Forex stock exchange and building industry services.

Why Yandex?

Coming back to the most important search engine in Russia… Yandex – not very well organized in late ‘90s, now is the leader of search engines in Runet. The company put an emphasis on contextual advertising and doubled its revenues last year, becoming even stronger player at the market. The management estimates that this year’ income from search-related advertising should be close to 0 million. At present, 25 million people use Yandex with 5 million of unique users every day. On the contrary, tens of thousands of companies conduct their promotional activity through this search engine. The constantly growing audience of Yandex makes more advertisers interested in both search engine optimization (being well exposed in organic listings) and PPC marketing (paid listings). They seem to make the right decision as the results come very quickly because of modern character of Yandex. Since 2005 it has had two advertising systems, comparable to Google AdWords and AdSense (according to Yandex official blog – http://company.yandex.ru/blog/).

Cheap listing better than expensive banner impression

Lew Glejzer, the director of AdWatsh advertising agency predicts that expenses on search engine marketing in 2007 will go over 0 million in total. All innovative companies that think about future take seriously into account paid listings – adds Dmitrij Wasiljew, Link.ru director. The banners are becoming more expensive and will probably be exclusively used by large companies while search engine marketing is affordable for SMBs as well.

“Key” keywords

In order to be completely successful one need to use precisely defined keywords – the ones which are both relevant to company business profile and are frequently used by people in queries made in search engines. The most popular queries between Dec 2006 and Feb 2007 were: papers (proceedings), desktop wallpapers, horoscope, postcards, weather, games, news, mp3, proverbs, dates, mobile phones, recipes, friendships, music, anecdotes, jobs, cars, predictions, sex, erotics, map of Moscow, chat, samsung d500, kamasutra, flats, photos, nokia, football, russian radio, lyrics, motorization, porno, pregnancy, Aeroflot (according to SpyLOG stats – http://gs.spylog.ru/r/?reportId=8&categoryId=1). Maybe this will be an inspiration for somebody when planning a PPC campaign on, let’s say, Yandex…

Who can see the advertisement?

Most of them are the Russian people – 44.4%, but the advertisement can be also presented to the Americans (14.5%), Ukrainians (4.7%) and Germans (3.5%) not to mention others. That is why search engine marketing in Russia gives the opportunities to reach people from different parts of the world. When talking about the Russian cities, there is one strong leader – the capital (Moscow) with 44% and other cities like Sankt-Petersburg (10.1%) or Jekaterynburg (2.6%), according to SpyLOG stats (http://gs.spylog.ru/rsu/?categoryId=1).

What are the benefits of search engine marketing?

Search engines are responsible for a significant traffic share on Russian websites. This is the result of good exposure in organic listings as well as paid listings activity conducted by Russian companies. The examples below present some traffic statistics on different sectors in the Runet in Nov 2006 (SpyLog stats http://gs.spylog.ru/tcu/5/preView/274.html).

Finance
Users monthly: 1 200 000Traffic share:57% – direct visits32% – search engines11% – other sourcesThe most commonly used keyphrases in this sector:credits, banks, mortgage, consumer credits, car credits, credit calculator, credit card
Computers
Users monthly: 1 801 000Traffic share:64% – direct visits29% – search engines7% – other sourcesThe most commonly used keyphrases in this sector:notebooks, computers, driver, computer sale, notebook sale, notebook review, Asus, laptop installment, Dell inspiron 1300, Dell inspiron 6400
Mobile phones
Users monthly: 1 115 500Traffic share:47% – search engines46% – direct visits7% – other sourcesThe most commonly used keyphrases in this sector:mobile phones, cellphones, nokia, mobile phones catalogue, sony ericsson, nokia 8800, mobile phones online sellers, mobile phone sale, nokia n72
Cars
Users monthly: 1 923 000Traffic share:44% – search engines38% – direct visits18%- other sourcesThe most commonly used keyphrases in this sector:Mazda, Ford, Nissan, Citroen, Honda, Mitsubishi, Suzuki, Renault, Ford Focus
Travel
Users monthly: 2 484 900Traffic share:58% – direct visits33% – search engines9% – other sourcesThe most commonly used keyphrases in this sector:Turkey, warm countries trips, hotels in Turkey, Egypt, holidays in Turkey, holidays in Egypt, hotels in Egypt, New Year trips, Greece, Tunis, Creta.

Runet + SEM = SUCCESS

By spending money on search engine marketing in Runet one can create new opportunities, particularly in the commerce area. The advertising activity in Russian search engines gives the possibility for all companies focused on the international trade (both exporters and importers) to be present on this big market in order to make new business contacts, agreements and increase the revenues. As usually, the first ones will be the winners – that is why we strongly recommend taking into consideration SEM activity in Russia as it may bring significant profits for almost every company.

Author (LinkedIn profile) is the owner of Bluerank – Polish SEM agency specializing in search engine optimization and paid listings campaigns for worldwide customers concentrating on the activity in the Eastern Europe. All the Polish speaking readers are very welcome on the corporate SEM & SEO blog to share their comments and opinions.

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