Searching for Customers

A short primer on how search engines are changing marketing

The statistics are undeniable. 80 percent of people online use a search engine. More importantly, 75 percent of people find a company’s website through a search engine. And, search engines have surpassed advertising as the number one way of acquiring new customers.

The world of online marketing has exploded in the last three years, not coincidentally with meteoric rise of Google. Search engine are big, big business and changing the way we do business.

The search engine industry now considers itself to have two distinct parts: search engine optimization and search engine marketing. Each plays an important role in a company’s positioning online.

Search engine optimization

Search engine optimization (SEO) refers to the main content displayed when a user enters a search term (e.g. “dog car seats”). The search engine queries its database of billions of pages of content and presents a set of results to the user.

SEO experts claw and scratch to make their way into the magical top ten of results the same way that consumer product companies fight for shelf space in a grocery store.

The order of results is the culmination of two factors. The first is indexing by the search engine itself. Every day, search engines use programs to crawl the Internet for new content. The content is then stored in massive data centers worldwide.

The second factor is ranking. Each search engine uses complex mathematical formulas with dozen of factors to decide the ranking. The process can be maddening because each search engine ranks pages differently, though everyone agrees that Google is the most important right now. Experts also agree that linking from other websites to your website is one of the primary drivers of ranking.

Search engine marketing

The explosion of search engine use led to the explosion of search engine advertising or sponsored links. Search engine marketing (SEM) involves paying for sponsored links that drive traffic to a specific website. SEM users pay a set fee per person that clicks their sponsored links.

SEM rankings are just as important as SEO rankings – the higher up the list the better. The ranking comes with the inherent risk that more people who are not your customer will click the link without an intention to buy.

Applications in business

SEO should be part of every company’s marketing strategy because search engine use is so pervasive and fickle. This is especially true of business-to-business companies with complex products and long sales cycles.

By contrast, SEM is primarily a consumer tactic right now because of the immediacy of the transaction.

Every page a homepage

Search engines have created an additional marketing challenge. Because engine rank content for a specific page, every single page on a website has become a potential entry point for a prospective customer.

This phenomenon is forcing marketing and corporate communications to reshape website design and content so that visitors can navigate the website from any page rather than from just the homepage.