5 Ways How Search Marketing Can Grow Your Business

By Cheow Yu Yuan, December 16 2008

Search engine marketing or SEM, is a form of online marketing tool that promotes a website through search engines such as Google and Yahoo. Search engine marketing helps increase a website's online visibility in search engine result page (SERP), which in return brings in targeted traffic to the website.

Nowadays, a person who is in his or her buying process will most probably fire up the search engine and conduct a search online. Therefore, it is important that your company's website has visibility in SERP when your potential customers are searching for your product or service.

Let us say that your company is the industry leader of the Aircon industry. When people search for "aircon" or "aircon service", you will want your website to show up at the top of the search engine result page, preferably higher than your resellers or affiliates. If your website has no visibility on search engines, you are losing business to small players even though you are the industry leader. The quote from SEMPO (Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization) sums it up - "Top of Search = Top of Mind".

In this article, let me share with you 5 ways how search engine marketing can help grow your business:

1. Reach out to global market easily. With the help of the Internet, you can now conduct business globally and target the masses easily with just a few clicks of the mouse. With search engine marketing, you can streamline your campaign to countries that you want to target.

2. Get more potential customers to visit your website. Numerous surveys have shown that search engine is the #1 tool that people use to find websites, products and services. More than 80% of Internet users rely on search engines & directories as their preferred method for locating websites. So with search engine marketing, you can attract more visitors to your website and convert them to your customers.

3. Increase sales conversion. Traffic from search engines is highly qualified and targeted because searchers are actively searching for information regarding your product or service. This is the major difference between search engine marketing and banner advertising. Search engine marketing brings you targeted traffic to your website that helps increase the sales conversion rate.

4. More cost effective. The cost of running a search engine marketing campaign is significantly lower than that for banner or TV advertising. And as search engine traffic is highly qualified, you can get more conversions with lower cost, which results in better Return On Investment (ROI).

5. Build brand. When your company's website has high visibility on search engines, people who are searching for keywords or key phrases that relate to your product or service will be able to see your company's website. In this case, you are creating brand awareness in their minds. Remember: "Top of Search = Top of Mind".

Search engine marketing definitely has multiple benefits to businesses. With an effective search engine marketing campaign, you can now scale your business to greater heights.