SEO and Google AdWords

This week’s lecture I found to be a fairly dry subject consisting of, Google Adwords, Google Analytics, and Search Engine Optimization.

In 2006, advertisers spent US$9.4bn on search engines, in North America alone, and with this amount of money being poured into it, search engines are an important strategic tool for many organisations in directing traffic to a particular company’s website, however it is still a relatively new phenomenon.

The definition of search engine marketing is “a form of marketing on the Internet that business and organisations seek to gain visibility on SERPs through paid of non-paid means” (Moran and Hunt 2005 cited Pan et al 2010, p8).

According to Pan et al., (2010), in 2008, Google was the search engine of choice with 63% of people using it, with 73% of users only scrolling down the first page. This is why it is more beneficial for the companies to pay Google to become a “sponsored link”; this way they are in the premium location for the people searching Google, and therefore they are more likely to be clicked on.

We also looked at the use of short tail and long tail keywords, and what is more effective in natural searching. The longer the tail searches, the easier it is to rank, and this is a much easier way of getting people to visit a company’s particular website.

Searching for “Benefit Cosmetics” on Google, this is a short tail search, and the first listing in Google was in the pink highlighted box, and so it is clear that Benefit has paid to be a sponsored link; with the hope that more people will visit their website.