What are the benefits and drawbacks of search marketing?

Search marketing could be broken down into two entities. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) - Organic listing and SEM (Search Engine Marketing) – Paid listing. Search marketing have become an important part of a marketing plan, especially so, with the widely use of search engine. Starting as a directory, search engine evolved with the stellar growth of website and webpage on the internet. With this growth, search engines have become a new avenue for marketers, as part of their marketing campaign to acquire traffic and customers.

Out of the many, the top three search engines are Google, Yahoo and Bing. With 2 billion searches done daily on Google alone, it is now an important marketers’ choice for promoting their products or services.

Drawbacks

One of the main drawbacks of search engines, that have been a marketer’s nightmare, is that they are known to keep changing their algorithm in determining the ranking on the SERP (Search Engine Result Page). Search engines rankings also take a long process to be listed especially for organic listings. Apart from that, there is the steep learning curve for someone to do it themselves or the cost to hire someone to do SEO for their page. For a site owner, there is also the need to make sure that the contents are relevant and sites to be search engine friendly to be able to get a good result in their Quality Score. This is a long process, where site owners have to wait for the search engine spiders to crawl the site to get it listed.

For paid listings, there is the missed opportunity as many searchers would over-look the paid listing and click on the organic listings. For some popular search terms, it could be too competitive and expensive for small businesses.

Benefits

One of the benefits to search marketing is that it is measurable that you can directly measure its effectiveness when executing a campaign. Be it from the number of click-through to the number of views of the website. If you are using paid listings, your page could be listed as fast as within a few minutes. Many marketers found search marketing to be the most effective, with higher ROI compared to other traditional marketing. Another benefit of search marketing is that it is non-intrusive, whereby the person being marketed to is more receptive as they are usually somewhere in the buying cycle.

Implementing search marketing also improves visibility and particularly for paid listing, this result in immediate traffic. It is also the easiest to implement and has the ability for testing. The search result being presented to the viewers are also relevant to what they had searched for.