Search Engine Marketing – Your Key to Online Visibility

China boats the highest internet penetration rate among all nations. As the number of consumers migrating to the digital landscape is rising, the role of search engines will become more vital for a company’s marketing strategy in China. Let us understand the concept of Search Engine Marketing – When a business person or a consumer searches the net either by clicking through a directory hierarchy or a text box, s/he is in hunting mode. This psychological state occurs because it gives signals to the search engine and to the marketers that the person is looking for some information often of an indirect or direct commercial nature. Marketers very well understand that the hunt mode describes that the searcher may very well be at the end, middle or beginning stages of the buying cycle. When someone is looking for a service or a product for satisfying a future or an immediate need they are not in a normal state. They want relevant information and are open to acting and digesting on the information at their fingertips, all these are made possible through a search engine. This enables search engine results in some of the best sources of targeted traffic, whether this traffic originates from paid advertising listings or organic unpaid search listings.

Many marketers believe that search engines deliver Search Engine Results Page (SERP) or search results in the form of purely textual results. The fact is search results can be any mixture of audio, video, images, text or any other file formats. Many nations have specialty or general-purpose search engines launched at their respective countries to meet the demand of the local people just like China where Baidu is the preferable choice which is used by more than 95 % of the Chinese netizens. Moreover, new forms of search are rapidly evolving including voice-driven search and search within app environments.

Search engines use algorithms for providing the most relevant results to each user taking into account the search keywords and the user’s location, identity, past search behavior, and operating system. As search engines compete for the eras, eyeballs, and attention of the users, there is a greater incentive for constant innovation and improvement. For leveraging the power contained in this targeted traffic source, marketers must understand how effectively they should use both organic and paid search engine marketing in China and set realistic goals about what they can expect each method to achieve. Search engine traffic is unique in several ways.

It is a non-intrusive methodology of marketing

Most of the offline and online advertising intrudes on the audience thereby interrupting the present activities. Search is unique in tapping users at the exact moment when he or she is seeking solution or knowledge. Searchers are always on a mission: it’s just-in-time marketing.

 Originated from audience-driven and voluntary search behavior

Here the visitors engaged in search results or from a search results link have selected your content (video, image, link or any other format) from your peers but prefers to choose the search query that resulted in your organic or ad content being shown.

Organic search engine marketing combines the best practices of online promotion/PR, copy, usability, technology, and creativity

Many search engines base their relevant algorithms on a combination of the text they see on an image, video, site or a page and combine the content information with eternal elements like user preferences/behaviors and links demonstrated over time for a particular content element, content source or domain.

Marketers put legitimate efforts for organic SEO optimization specifically in server platform adjustments, content clarity optimization, content formatting, and site design. Paid search listings and ads played a major role for marketers due to their rising screen real estate mainly on mobile devices. Paid listings which are very popular are product listing ads, local search ads, video search ads, shopping search, paid inclusion and paid placement. In both PR and SEO, marketers have the choice of hiring an outside agency, consultants or internal staff. Marketers must communicate with the users and understand their requirements – ready to purchase, in need of some information or facing a crisis.