In addition to paid advertising, one of the most powerful ways to find consumers is by making sure your business and products can be found when a potential customer conducts a search on Internet. Product related searches reveal strong consumer intention by studying the patterns of Internet searches, such as who used what keywords to find what information and products. A company can try to detect and convert new consumers when they appear. In paid search marketing, advertisers can provide search engines with a list of keywords most relevant to their products and services and specify the conditions in which a keyword, or a combination of keywords, could be triggered. When a consumer uses these keywords to search for a product, an ad will appear at the top of the search engine results page, or SERP, Serp. If the consumer clicks on the search ad to reach the advertisers webpage then the advertisers pay for that ad impression. Google is by far the most dominant search engine in the world. It offers a suite of useful tools such as Google Analytics, Google AdWords, and DoubleClick to help advertisers monitor web traffic to their websites, analyze keywords, and manage a paid search advertising campaign. Since there is an abundance of excellent and freely available learning and training materials on paid search advertising, including those from Google itself, I will not dive in too deep here. I highly recommend learners take advantage of the resources that Google provides to the advertisers, including a user-friendly guy to AdWords to learn more about search advertising. In this lesson, however, I would like to focus on unpaid organic search marketing through search engine optimization, or SEO. The key objective of SEO in marketing is to make a business website appear at the top of a search result page when a potential consumer conducts a related search. Optimization of a website for search engines require an understanding of how a search engine's ranking system works. In the broadest sense, search engines rank web pages similar to how we judge people. They're evaluated based on their popularity, authority, relevance, trust, and importance. For example, Google's core technology is its search ranking system called Pagerank, named after one of Google's co-founders, Larry Page. The Pagerank algorithm works by evaluating the importance of webpages by considering a variety of factors. The original page rank system works by assessing the amount and quality of inbound links to a webpage. The ranking system sees an external link to the webpage as an endorsement. The more endorsements a webpage has, the more important it is. Web pages that Google deems to be more important then receive a higher Pagerank score and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results. Similarly, Google's competitors, Yahoo and Microsoft, both have similar ranking systems to determine the order of search results displayed. At this point, I'd like you to watch a short video to learn a bit more about the technologies behind search engines. Search engine optimization encounters two kinds of obstacles. The first is technical. You must remove the technical barriers that prevent the search engine spider from accessing, indexing, and displaying your webpages on the SERP. In other words, make your web assets search engine friendly. The second obstacle is the competitive market environment. You must recognize that millions of websites are competing for a few top spots on a SERP. A search marketer must stay current and closely monitored ever-changing market condition by looking at both internal, external, and the competitive factors. As much as it is technical, SEO is an art of strategy. Sometimes a simple change of a search keyword or a line of computer code can open doors to new market segments and differentiate your businesses from your competitors. SEO can be achieved by making sure that your website pages, titles, tags, content, and overall structure are optimized for the target keywords. This is also called on-site SEO. You also need to make sure that you have a significant amount of inbound links from highly respected external websites, and that is often known as offsite SEO. You need to have both on-site and off-site SEOs to be successful and finding the right mix has everything to do with analytics and tracking. Similar to paid search advertising, the keywords that drive customers to your site are crucial in SEO. You must be using the right keywords or run the risk of spending time and money driving the wrong people to your website. Many businesses make the mistake of optimizing their sites based on the keywords they think people are using, not the keywords people are actually using to search for a product. It is not hard to do a little research and find out exactly how your prospects are searching for businesses like yours. Google offers some helpful keyword research tools, before more robust solutions you need to turn to a marketing software solution like HubSpot or Marketo.
