In the last few months, I’ve been approached many times by friends, colleagues and other acquaintances curious about digital marketing. Well I’m not surprised by the deluge in interest, thanks to the proliferation of Internet, mobile phones and the staggering growth year on year. Going by estimates, marketers and businesses will allot a disproportionate amount of their budget into digital marketing. It is essential then that you know about digital marketing especially if you are a sales or marketing professional. This post and a series of future posts will cover the different aspects of digital marketing – a primer of sorts.

I shall start the series with search engine marketing. It’s apt since it’s also where marketers spend their most in a digital campaign. I will start with the basics and take you behind the scenes of a search campaign.

Search engine was that one feature that made the Internet far more useful and accessible. For one, it symbolized the index of the Internet where you could search for anything that was published online; if it was on the internet it had to be indexed by search engines.
For most users Internet browsing started with a visit to their favourite search engine, including those who even type in their URL in search engines.
This was obviously a gold mine for businesses that saw the huge potential to reach out to potential customers.

Search engine marketing is possible Organically and through Paid inclusions.

Organic search results are listings on the search page in relevance to the search terms. They are also called natural search results because the results that appear are not sponsored and appear because the search engine deems it relevant to the user’s query. It’s a universally acknowledged fact that organic search results get more clicks or visits than paid search, because the user perceives the results as unbiased (as opposed to a paid inclusion).

But there is a caveat. An organic search result is at the discretion of the search engine’s algorithm, and there is no guarantee of its position or placement. For a website to appear high in organic search results takes time and requires the destination page to be search engine optimized (popularly known as SEO). SEO requires optimizing a website, editing its content and associated HTML coding to increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines. Some of these tactics involves tagging the different elements of a page with contextual content and increasing the density of keywords that are relevant to the business. For e.g. if your business is into financial services, SEO would involve having a high occurrence of keywords/phrases like “insurance”, “mutual funds”, “investments”, “home loans” etc in the website content.
Promoting a site to increase the number of inbound links (links from other websites), is another SEO tactic.

In the case of Paid Inclusion, in the early days search engines opened up advertising in the form of banners, where advertisers were charged for impressions, referred to as CPM. CPM or Cost Per Mille is where advertisers are charged for every thousand impressions (Mille is Latin for thousand). Although this brought in the revenues for search engines there was nothing innovative about this approach as it was just an extension of conventional advertising. As far as advertisers were concerned, this wasn’t exciting enough.

CPM based advertising was the norm until one man came up with a concept that revolutionized the search marketing business. Bill Gross, the founder of Goto.com, a serial entrepreneur came up with the sponsored click or the pay per click (popularly referred to as PPC) model. This was the first performance pay model and promised the advertisers more bang for the buck. In effect, advertisers had to pay only if a prospect responded or clicked on the ad.
The concept took off and was a runaway success; the advertisers were now coming in droves! Bill’s company Goto.com that was later renamed as Overture got acquired by Yahoo in 2003 for $1.63 billion and integrated into Yahoo’s search marketing solution.

When we think of search engines however, there is only one name that comes to mind – Google. In a sense Google defines the category it belongs to, becoming synonymous with search.
Google opened itself to advertising in December 1999 and introduced the AdWords platform allowing advertisers to create text ads that were contextual to the search keywords. Interestingly though, in the early days AdWords platform was CPM based and Google switched over to a PPC mode in September 2002.

The AdWords platform takes click through rate into consideration along with advertiser’s bid to determine the ad’s relative position within the paid search results. This ensures that the more effective ad stays higher in position regardless of higher bids from its competitors.
For example, lets assume that A, B and C are bidding for keywords related to financial services; If A’s ads are more relevant and receives higher CTR, the sponsored search ad for A in Google will be positioned higher than others even though A is bidding the least for the keyword.

Now that you have been introduced to SEO and PPC, you should also know how to select the different keywords for your campaign.

You need to first identify an initial set of keywords or key phrases that are relevant to your business. Once you have compiled the initial set, use a keyword suggestion tool like the one offered by Google https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal to generate a population of keywords.

How do you decide which of these keywords go into a SEO campaign and which ones will go into a PPC campaign? The answer lies in the long tail approach as is illustrated in the following.

Keywords Segmenting: The Long-Tail Approach

In the graph, I’ve segmented keywords by length on the X-axis and by frequency, cost, and competition on the Y-axis. Observe that the short keywords and phrases form part of the head of this distribution, whereas the longer, more descriptive keywords form part of the long tail.

The keywords that constitute the head are typically brand or category keywords and fetch a high number of search queries. However the entry barrier is also high because of high competition and higher bidding cost. The keywords in this segment should become part of your SEO strategy.
Since the head keywords include your brand keywords, it doesn’t help doing a PPC campaign if your objective is getting in new customers.

The keywords and phrases that form the long tail, on the other hand, are best suited for your PPC strategy because the specificity of the keywords implies that the user has a good intention of becoming a prospect/customer. The bounce rate (the % of users leaving the website after having viewed only one page) is also lower in the case of the tail keywords. Doing an SEO on the tail keywords isn’t advised because there are too many keywords, phrases to be optimized. Your website content couldn’t possibly contain all those keywords and it would be akin to keyword spamming if your content contained all those keywords – search engines don’t like that. Also, SEO takes time and even if you ended up optimizing a portion of the keywords in the tail, it could take a long time before they bear fruit.

Well you now know the basics of search marketing, but keep in mind that a good search marketing campaign is a result of tweaking and optimization until you get the balance right.

With this I end the first of the series on digital marketing and I hope you found it insightful. If there is anything specific you wish you to know and want to discuss, please leave your comments, suggestions below.