Search engine marketing which is considered as one of the most effective channel
of internet marketing is always on upswing and today we can see its potential by the level of money entrepreneurs are putting onto it.
Basically search engine marketing has its roots back in mid 90s when there was an advent of search engines. We all know Altavista, Lycos and Yahoo which was then followed by Google which proved to the ultimate of all search engines. Today google is a sort of semantic search engine and enjoys the major market cap in the search engine industry. Currently it constitutes of 95% of total searches done on internet.
In other words if you are on google, you are almost everywhere because if fetches the results from social media websites as well including Linkedin, Twitter & Facebook. Hence its important if you are on search engines especially google.
So what exactly is search engine marketing. In general it comprises of both forms of marketing across search engines including Search engine optimization (SEO) and Pay per click management (PPC). Both these constitute the foundation pillars for search and businesses are intended to invest in them.
There is no direct comparison between SEO and PPC as both of them are different forms of marketing and involved different techniques to bring in the customers on the website. Its difficult to predict which way is better than the other for a given business but as per usual marketing trends its preferred to run both at the same time. Hence if you own a website, you can run the SEO along with PPC because it takes sometime for a website to gain ranks while with PPC you can target your customer very quickly.
Although its been found that SEO is more cost effective than PPC but its rather difficult to judge things this way. There could be a case where the conversion rate is higher in PPC to SEO and vice-versa. So nothing can be said with absolute certainty for both these processes.
But the most important thing which should be noted here is that its a targeted way of advertising and marketing your product or services and this is what a major key differentiator for search engine marketing.
There are lots of avenues coming up for marketing a website and social media is one of them but nothing can surpass the search engine marketing and its associated forms which includes SEO and PPC.