Marketing your business involves ongoing decision-making. You may be wondering if search marketing could be right for your business. Here’s a brief guide to search marketing.

What is search marketing?

Search marketing involves promoting websites by making them more visible in search engine results. This may be through search engine optimization – managing websites to make them appear higher in search results – or through paid inclusion, where you pay to be included in search engine results. Paid inclusion may mean paying to be listed in a search engine or it may include pay per click ads.

Who does search marketing?

You can do search marketing in house, through contractors or by working with a dedicated search marketing team. In the past, I’ve worked with Danny Blea from The Search Source, a search engine marketing consulting firm, but I’ve also carried out extensive campaigns for my business and those of my clients. And, by putting simple strategies in place, I’ve been able to have my assistants and contractors carry out that search marketing for me. It really comes down to your budget, your available resources, your desire to be involved in the process and your comfort in handing off the work to a dedicated professional team.

How does it fit with reputation management?

Search marketing can also be part of your reputation management. Not only can you help make sure people find you online, but you can also work toward having them find the results you want. In some cases, you may find that unfair or undeserved customer reviews are popping up at the top of results for your company name. Or perhaps a news story or other unfavourable result shows up on the first page of results in search engines. By putting together a reputation management program, you can bump those results away from page one, so that clients can instead focus on current, relevant information from sites you control.

Points to ponder before you start search marketing?

Who are your target customers?
What ways are they finding your website now?
What words and terms do they use?
What else shows up when your customers search for you?
Do you have undesirable results showing up in searches for your personal, product or company names?
Do you have the resources and desire to manage search marketing in house?
What do you want to achieve?
What existing resources can you leverage to kick off your search marketing?

Are you using search marketing for your business? Leave a comment below to start the discussion.