Mabelline Tan

• What are the benefits and drawbacks of a search marketing

Search Engine Marketing or SEM is an internet marketing strategy used to optimize websites and essentially make them 'search engine' friendly. By conducting search marketing, it can result for businesses an increase in website ranking, better page rankings in a search page an possibly sales for the company.

Benefits

Search marketing can drive targeted traffic to your site all the time. When the site has a digital presence on internet searches, we can forget about selling our products by cold-calling or by knocking doors. We can depend on search marketing to give us leads. 

Search marketing allows businesses to reach out to a global audience. We can now do business globally as there is no geographical boundaries anymore.

Get more targeted traffic to your website. Search engine is the number one traffic referral source for most websites. Millions of searches are conducted every day as people look for websites, information, products and services. With search marketing, you can definitely get more targeted traffic to your website. 

Search marketing is cost effective. When compared to other traditional advertising media, search marketing is definitely more cost effective. Search engine traffic is more targeted which makes it easier for you to convert prospects to customers

Search marketing allows business to build their brand. When your website has high visibility on search engines, you are showing your prospects that your business is an authority brand. When earchers seee your website often, they will remember your brand. Even if they do not need the product or service now, they will still think of your brand first when they need it in the near future. 

(retrieved from http://www.webdynamic.com.au/references/search-engine-marketing/the-benefits-of-search-engine-marketing.html)

Disadvantages

The challenge of SEO is that there are over 8 billion pages in the search engine indexes with your position in the SERPs dependent on a constantly changing algorithm which is not published. So making your pages visible may require specialist knowledge, constant monitoring and the ability to respond. As a consequence, the biggest disadvantage of SEO is a lack of control. You are subject to changes in the algorithm.

Favours big players. For companies with a lower budget or a narrower range of products on which to increase lifetime value it may be not possible to compete. Large players can also get deals on their media spend through their agencies.

Search marketing can be time consuming. It can take a long time for page rankings to improve a notch. 

Advertisers may be prevented from competing on a level playing field, because competitors and even affiliates may use less ethical black hat SEO techniques.

In competitive sectors it may be very difficult to get listed in the top few results for competitive phrases. This is when PPC may have to be used, although this can be expensive in a competitive sector.