SES London: Search Engine Marketing is an Art and Science

We are at SES London! We’ve turned up at a great location at the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre, right in the heart of the city. Westminster Abbey and the Big Ben are beautiful backdrops to this great annual search event. Over the next few days we will keep you up to date with blog posts, tweets and a photo feed from our Flickr account.

If you are interested in an introduction to Search Engine Marketing (SEM), read on as this morning we attended a presentation by Erica Schmidt (SES Advisory Board & Global Search Director, iProspect).  

SEM an Art and a Science

Erica calls SEM an art as well as a science. It takes a bit of artistic insight to choose the right keywords, to write the right ads and to make them appear to a specific audience. In my opinion this is the interesting part of SEM and nothing you could not achieve yourself. Here are some insights from Erica:

Where do searchers come from?

According to Erica ‘67% of online search users are driven there from somewhere else’

• Press-30%
• TV -37%
• Radio-17%
• Outdoor-20%

What should you think about when using Pay Per Click (PPC)?

• Remember the user. Get the keywords they actually use to search for a product.
• Integrate search into your strategy.
• Your marketing manager may love straplines but they are meaningless in a search ad. You have little space & time to capture someone’s attention, so be descriptive.
• Avoid clever or gimmicky product names.

What words should be keywords?

• When starting your keyword research, think about the ‘keyword universe’. This defines all the potential searches a marketer might want to appear for.
• So start a little keyword brainstorm session if you like and keep in mind the keywords should always be relevant to your business.
• Next you organize these keywords into logical little groups, keeping only very similar keywords together. Structure is key to the success of a PPC campaign and will allow you to target keywords with relevant ads.
• There are different kinds of keywords: generic (‘lawnmower’) specific (‘green push lawn mower’) and brand keywords (‘John Deer lawnmower’ or core brand keywords such as ‘John Deer’) All these keywords have a different role and function into finally getting people to convert on your site. When structuring your keywords in (ad) groups, you keep these different kinds of keywords separated in different ad groups as well.
• Search engines provide tools to help you with your keyword research. Like Microsoft Advertising Intelligence. They can also can give you an idea of the popularity of a keyword over time and give you demographic insights.

The benefits of PPC

• Get new customers at a low cost.
• Increase brand awareness.
• Compliment on- and offline.
• Generate immediate visibility on keywords.
• It is highly measurable.

The role of SEO

SEO is cost effective, good for long term results and usually brings in engaged visitors. When optimizing your site for SEO keep the following in mind:

• Crawlability: eliminate spider roadblocks (such as long links, hashtags etc.) contextually relevant
• Content is king! Rich content brings users to your site, generates extra content to be indexed by search engines, gives additional opportunities for people to link to your site.
• Keyword density & frequency.
• Meta data title description.
• Credibility.
• Also read our tips from a recent event on SEO, PPC & Social Media.
• So if you haven’t done so already get creative with the art of Search Engine Marketing!

Also listen to the interview with  Jeffrey Hayzlett, Former CMO of Kodak at SES by Mel Carson.

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