search engines The basic toolkit of ranking in search engines

Search engines can be one of the most effective marketing channels for digital products and services, but many companies misunderstand how to use and leverage them. For a long time and even today many marketers see search engine traffic as free and fail to invest into this vital channel. However with online commerce booming the days of free traffic showers from Google and co are long gone.

Organic search marketing

Organic marketing in the context of search engines refers to the results in search engines from your pages and the traffic you can receive from it. While you don’t have to pay for users finding you on search results making your page be found at the top results often requires a lot of work and investment.

Organic search marketing is consistent of two important parts, one happens on page and the other off page. On page search engine optimisation refers to everything you can do on your website to make it more relevant for visitors and engines like Google. Generally this includes writing good texts, making your page parsable by search crawlers and providing context with meta tags, titles and structured data.

Off page work are activities you can do outside your website to make it easier to be found and appear more relevant for search engines. This includes using tools such as the Google Webmaster Console and engaging with other websites that are relevant for your product and service to link to your websites.

Paid search marketing

While organic search marketing is a science and whole marketing chapter in itself, paid search ads or as they are more commonly referred to as “SEM”, seem more straight forward. You select your keywords and context and pay for every click, its that simple. But while it seems innocent at first doing SEM efficiently and making it matter to your companies bottom line is all but simple.

With modern self service options everyone can place ads on Google, Bing and similar search engines, but rarely getting an ad up is the challenge. To make it with SEM a lot of time and know-how has to be spent on crafting the right ad copy, setting up landing pages and sales funnels and tracking your results meticulously to continuously optimise the results.