What are the benefits and drawbacks of a search marketing

Search marketing, a process of gaining traffic and visibility from search engines through both paid and unpaid efforts. It encompasses:

    SEO: Earning traffic through unpaid or free listings

    SEM: Buying traffic through paid search listings

Below are the pros and cons of having a SEM:

Organic Search

Organic search are non-paid search result as compared to those paid ads.

Advantages:

It’s free! Search engines don’t charge to have our website come up in results.  However, it takes a lot of time and effort to develop the most relevant web presence. And in this business, time is money. Of course, we can hire an SEO firm to do it for us, which is an investment much easier to measure.

 

It’s trustworthy. People trust organic results a lot more than paid advertising. They are much more likely to click on organic listings than on a paid ads.

Disadvantages:

Lack of Control: there are a lot of factors and elements that are out of our control when dealing with organic results. What our competition does, our past history, and Google’s constantly evolving result preferences are all out of our control

Unknown Factors: Google is fairly secretive about what they use a formula for “relevant” sites. While we do know some general “best practices” Google likes to see, it’s not 100% clear what will drive your page to the top.

Paid search traffic

Paid traffic can take many forms including ads on search engines, ads within context, social media ads, etc. This type of traffic often takes the form of pay-per-click, where by clients only pay for visitors who have clicked on their ad.

Advantages:

Cost Control: with the payment set up, we can set budgets and limit how much we spend on a daily basis to ensure you’re not going over budget. Similarly we can manage each keyword’s bid to help target higher returning keywords.

Disadvantages:

Complexity of managing campaigns: There are a lot of settings, targeting, and optimization strategies that can be used for profitable campaigns. Organizing and strategizing these can take a lot of time and expertise.

Competition:  increased competition in this market has driven costs up, more so in certain markets.  Higher competition also means that those companies with big budgets and man power.

 

Conclusion

Search continues to become more and more complex as time goes on.  Paid search campaign shave introduced special shopping results, location extensions, and click-to-call capabilities. Organic results now feature local businesses, images, news, and even location adjustments.  What we can be sure of is that the landscape is constantly changing, so a real commitment to user experience and targeting is important in developing a search engine marketing campaign for any kind.