WHAT IS SEARCH MARKETING?

Search marketing, also sometimes referred to as search engine marketing or paid search marketing, is a collection of marketing methods used to increase the visibility of a web site in the search engine results pages of one or more search and content networks.

There are two basic types of search results: natural search results and sponsored search results. Sponsored search results are your primary concern here, but I will give a brief description of both.

Natural Search

Natural search results are, quite simply, a list of web sites, descriptions, and links to the sites in question. These are returned in response to the keywords entered into the search engine, which are used in an algorithm to select these sites from the search engine’s index of sites.

Notice that the natural search results do not always start immediately. Sometimes, sponsored search ads will appear above the natural search results, seemingly almost as part of the natural search results.

You’ll learn more about sponsored search soon enough, though. For now, let’s get back to natural search. There are two ways to promote a site in the natural search results: search engine optimization (SEO) and paid inclusion.

1. Search engine optimization (SEO). Search engine optimization is the process by which you attempt to improve a web site’s rankings for relevant keywords in search results by optimizing the web site structure and content in such a way as to make it more easily read and cataloged by the search engine’s software. The goal is to have the optimized site recognized by the search engine’s software as more relevant than other sites and to appear higher up in the search result listings as a result of the optimization.

Traffic generated by natural search results does not have to cost the site owner anything, so the search engine optimization process can make a tremendous difference in a site’s overall success and profitability.

2. Paid inclusion. Paid inclusion involves paying a search engine or search network to include a web site in its natural search index rather than simply submitting the site for consideration and possible inclusion for free. A site might also pay for a guaranteed high ranking in the natural search results.

That is as much as you need to know about natural search for now. The real focus of this article is sponsored search.

Sponsored Search

Sponsored, or paid, search results are actually advertisements usually text triggered by the same keywords that search engines use to select web sites for their natural search results. These text advertisements run to the right side of the natural search results and sometimes just above them.

These ads are usually identified as sponsored results, but because of the performance algorithms used by the premiere search engines, these paid advertisements are also highly relevant to the search terms entered, and many users are quite willing to click on these ads if they appear to offer what they are searching for.

The format is similar on most other search engines as well.

Regardless of where these ads actually appear, however, there are two basic models for sponsored search: pay for placement and performance-based paid search.

Although both models can be used to make money in affiliate advertising, the performance-based model offers greater opportunities to affiliate advertisers who rely on search marketing to generate their affiliate commissions.

Pay for Placement.

The pay-for-placement model simply rewards the highest bidders with the highest ad placements, which usually generate the highest volume of clicks. This can be an excellent option for a Web business that has higher margins than its competitors and can afford to pay more and still make a profit, but it is a very difficult model for affiliate advertisers to make profitable.

The reason for this difficulty is that affiliates are often competing with dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of other affiliates trying to promote the same affiliate programs using the same keywords.

Naturally, the return on any given keyword is roughly the same for all affiliates marketing the same program, and typically a number of them are bidding just under or right up to the amount they all know they will earn, on average, per click. This leaves a very narrow margin, if any, on which to build a profit.

There are a couple of ways to overcome this difficulty. For affiliate programs that offer performance tiers (higher payments for delivering more customers), an affiliate could aggressively attempt to outbid his or her competitors across a large number of relevant keywords and phrases with the goal of reaching one of the top performance tiers and thus raising the return per click above most of the competition.

The second method would be to tailor your ad to attract fewer, but more relevant, clicks than the other ads. For instance, if your commission is dependent on users paying to register in order to use a site, you could state this clearly in the ad. Fewer people will click on the ad, but more of those who do click on the ad knowing that they must pay to register will actually register, therefore providing you with a commission.

You will now be making more per click, on average, and be able to afford to pay more per click, thus raising your ad to a higher position, where it can generate more volume. You’ll learn more about writing ads in the coming articles, but for now let’s get back to learning about search marketing options.

Performance-Based Paid Search.

The performance-based search engine algorithms are really your best bet for setting yourself apart from the competition and making real money. Here is how they work: Instead of giving the highest placement to the highest bidder, a performance-based algorithm also looks at the clickthrough rate (CTR) of each ad.

If one ad has a higher CTR than another ad, the ad with the higher CTR will not have to bid as much as the lower-performing ad to run above it. How much less you may be required to bid and still run above the higher-paying ad depends on just how much higher your CTR is compared to the competing ad or ads.

If your CTR is more than double that of the other ads, you might bid and pay as little as half as much and still have your ad run above the competition, generating more clicks at a lower cost than your competition. That’s right more clicks at a lower cost. So remember to pay attention later, when you start learning how to write these ads, because ad copy is king in the land of performance-based search marketing!