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Search engine marketing helps to increase leads and sales cost effectively

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As online competition and prices rise, it is more and more important to maintain competitive edge online.

Search engine marketing, like most direct marketing is there to increase leads and sales cost effectively whilst also adding to brand building and development.

Search engine marketing covers search engine optimisation (SEO) i.e. increasing your rankings in the organic (non-paid) search results of a search engine, and paid search advertising, i.e. pay per click (PPC), pay per action, pay per thousand impressions, backed up by analytics such as Google Analytics to understand where vistors are coming from, how they behave on site and which are the most profitable.

By combining pay per click and search engine optimisation you can boost returns by as much as 40% but effective search engine marketing requires a range of skills.

In SEO interesting content and good copywriting are essential for your site to get better search engine rankings and higher conversion rates.

This also means that you have to understand the keywords and phrases that people use to find the web sites they're looking for. Then you have to learn how to identify the best keywords for your site and how to integrate them into your title tags, headlines and copy.

Then you have to ensure that your site has a good link strategy as search engines use links as one way to decide the value, authority and relevance of you site to a particular search query.

Nowdays, social media sites like Facebook and MySpace and social bookmarking sites like Digg and StumbleUpon also have a role to play.

Search engines used to focus just on delivering up a list of the best web pages for a search. Now they include video, images, blog listings, product listings and more, so you have to think about the whole strategy in the context of these developments, things like should you have a blog? And we must not forget vertical search engines which focus on results for a specific topic or industry and can be great sources of traffic.Then there is the need to think about local search tactics too.

Paid search advertising is different from SEO but can be hugely profitable.

Paid search provides the chance to buy your way to better positions on search results pages. PPC involves keyword triggered advertising on search engines and their content networks to drive targeted traffic to your web site.

Because it's paid for, an important point to keep in mind with all paid search engine marketing is that you must test, test, and then test again. Working out paid search means starting with the minimum reasonable investment to see how the search engine performs in terms of traffic and conversion to customers.

In all of SEO and paid search you need to understand what is going on. Like all direct marketing, analytics is crucial. It's just about measuring things, but as in all things it is understanding what to measure and when to measure it that is crucial.

Put simply:

• cost

• response

• cost per lead

• conversion rate

• cost per sale

• revenue

• volume

• seasonality

are generally the most important. Good analytics also provide a wealth of other data, but the KISS principle should always be kept in mind.

We are often asked the question about PPC v. SEO and which we would choose, which is a bit like asking whether you want milk on your cornflakes.

They can be used alongside each other and have their own advantages and disadvantages such as:

• PPC can work effectively within a few days, whilst SEO may take months. Therefore using PPC can be useful for new websites or for short term promotions.

• PPC is a constant cost whilst SEO provides value long after the initial work has been undertaken and so generally giving a higher ROI PPC in the long term.

• PPC can be assessed as money is invested, meaning that, if monitored closely, there is very little risk involved.

• It is worthwhile to include elements of both in a search engine marketing campaign concentrating on excellent SEO and using PPC to fill ultra-competitive gaps and flexibility in camapign volumes.

So, simply put, the answer is to look at your objectives, timescales etc and then choose.

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