Step 4

SEARCH ENGINES

Search engines help connect searchers with exactly what they’re looking for. That makes them a great place to market your business.

You can do this through: 

  • Organic search results (SEO)
  • Paid search results (SEM)

Advertising in search engines is effective for businesses, because the ads appear exactly when the potential customers are looking for what those businesses offer.

The main key to marketing for search engines is choosing the keyword(s) you want to target. This goes for SEO and SEM.

 

1. How search engines work

There are 3 main tasks that search engines perform:

  1. Crawling – they crawl the web to discover websites and content (like images and videos). Spiders and bots visit, and revisit, pages to find new content to add to their results
  2. Indexing – they categorize each webpage they find
  3. Ranking – they decide which content is most useful to searchers when they type in a keyword into the search engine

 

2. Search rankings

In other words, how search engines decide which results to show when a user enters a keyword:

  1. The search engine compares the words and phrases that were searched for to its index and looks for matching results
  2. If it finds hundreds of millions of matching results. This is where ranking comes in.

 

Search engines rank websites using their own top secret formulas. However, some of the known and important criteria they use is:

  • The words on the page
  • The number of backlinks
  • The age of the content – The more time the content is up the better it ranks

 

3. How search engines see a webpage

It see’s the HTML.

It looks for text in:

  • Title of the page <title>
  • Headings <h1> <h2>
  • Meta description
  • Paragraphs <p>

Use important words and phrases in these elements. The search engines prioritize the text in the order shown above.

Images:

  • Use relevant image names
  • Use alt tags which describe the images

 

4. Organic (unpaid) search and SEO

The goal of SEO is to help the search engine decide that your webpage is what people are looking for.

SEO involves making improvements to your website to make it appear higher in organic search results

  • On page SEO involves choosing keywords to target and including them in the text of your page
  • Off page SEO involves getting backlinks to your site

 

When targeting keywords to include for on page SEO, it’s best to target long tail keywords. If you’re targeting the keyword ‘photography’, your site will end up very deep within the search results because there are already very many high authority sites that rank high for that keyword. Try targeting longer tail, low search volume keywords like ‘wedding photography in Cambridge’ or ‘photography for family portraits’. Keep these keywords in your page title, headings, meta description, and paragraphs.

Organic search is great because it’s free but it takes a long time to improve your rankings.

 

Your approach to SEO planning:

  • Think of some words and phrases you’d like to rank for
  • Do a search for these terms and see what appears in the organic results
  • Study the HTML of the top pages to see where they have included the keywords you searched for
  • Compare what these sites have done on page with each other to see if you can identify the on-page reasons why the pages were ranked in the order that they were
  • If you’re just starting out, you can’t beat these webpages with backlinks, but you can try to include the keyword(s) in more prime places, like the title, headings, and meta description.

 

5. Paid search and SEM

Search ads appear as text links at the top of the SERPs, just like the organic results.

Every time somebody searches, advertisers compete for the opportunity to display their ads.

To decide which ads win out and get shown for a given keyword at a given time, search engines look at two different factors:

  1. The bid – the maximum amount the advertiser is willing to pay for a click on an ad. If someone clicks on the ad, the advertiser is charged an amount equal to, or less than, the bid. 
    1. If an advertiser bids $10 for a keyword, that’s the most they will pay for an ad click. If the ad appears and doesn’t get a click, the advertiser doesn’t pay anything.
    2. The average bid for a keyword varies industry by industry, and keyword by keyword
  2. The quality
    1. Winning the auction doesn’t just go to ads with the highest bid, search engines reward ads with strong relevance to the keyword that was searched

 

The advantage with search advertising is that you can reach customers at the very moment they are looking for what you offer.

 

Important notes:

  • Paid search ads are given a more prominent position on the search results page. They appear at the top (and bottom) of the SERPs
  • You are only charged when someone clicks on your ad.
  • Although they contain the same content as organic search results, paid ad results are labeled as ads so users are aware they are clicking on an ad, and there is no tricks involved.

 

When doing your keyword research, also look at the ads on the SERP. Who is targeting their ads at the keywords you are targeting for SEO and SEM. How big are the companies. The bigger the company, the bigger their advertising budget (the higher their bids) and the higher authority (quality) their site will be to Google.

 

6. Google Search Console

What is it?

It’s a service which gives you feedback on how your website is doing in Google search results.

 

It has two primary functions:

  • It monitors your performance in Google search results
  • It shows you how Google see’s your site

 

It includes a number of reports:

  1. The “Search Analytics” report can answer questions like:
    1. Which searches bring people to your site
    2. When searchers click on your links
    3. Which other sites link to yours
  2. The “Links to Your Site” report shows websites that link to your site. Think of these as referrals.
  3. The “Mobile Usability” report points out pages on your site that don’t work well on mobile phones and give tips for improvement.
  4. The “Crawl” report lets you monitor whether Google can visit your webpages. This is important because if Google can’t access your web pages, your content can’t be included in Google’s search results.
  5. The “Google Index” report shows you what information Google recorded about your site and tells you if your pages are accessible.

 

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