There are increasingly a range of acronyms being thrown around in web marketing that sometimes slip out when interacting with clients. Here’s a brief overview of some of the more common e-marketing acronyms to ease the conversation.
- SEM
Search Engine Marketing
SEM is a broad term covering the range of activities you might engage in to improve the extent to which you generate revenue via search engines
- SEO
Search Engine Optimisation
SEO focuses on the organic listings as opposed to sponsored listings, or PPC. The position of your site in the listings for a given search term is determined by a wide range of factors, each contributing to the search engine’s algorithm. They can be broadly divided, however, into two groups:
- Content Relevancy: The greater the extent to which the content of a page matches the search term in question, the better it will rank (subject to the engine’s spam protection measures).
- Trust relevancy The greater the extent to which a page is connected (by hyperlinks) to sites also well connected to other sites relevant to the search term, the better it will rank, based on it being a trusted resource.
- PPC
Pay Per Click
Many search engines present two listings when the user makes a search - the main, organic search results, and the sponsored listings. To achieve a sponsored listing, you must agree to pay a certain amount to the search engine every time someone clicks on your listing. Your bid compared to that of your competitors determines your position in the listing - bid prices can range from a few pence for less competitive phrases to several pounds for very competitive phrases. Most often however clicks will cost less than £0.50.
- SMO / SMM
Social Media Optimisation / Social Media Marketing
More recently, a new area has opened up in web marketing with the arrival of social networking and in particular social news websites, such as Digg, Reddit, and a host of others. These sites allow you to submit content to their ‘Upcoming’ listing, presented initially in reverse date/time order. As time passes, if your site receives votes, it maintains it’s high position and may reach the ‘popular’ listing. This is encouraging marketers to be creative and generate interesting content, as the potential returns of getting ‘dugg’ are substantial in the short and long term.
These statistics source from a compilation of SERPS behaviour studies for which I’ve listed source information at the end of the article. If you disagree with a figure, or have additional figures or sources, please do post them to the discussion.
- 42% of search users click the top-ranking link. 8% click the second-ranking link, and the click-through rate (CTR) continues to drop thereof.
- When these two top-ranking links are artificially switched, the click-through ratio of 42-8% drops to 34-12%, demonstrating the importance of engaging copy in addition to rank position.
- 62% of search users click a link on the first page of search results
- 23% of searches progress to the second page. Presumably the difference between 62% ans 23% stems from searchers trying either another keyword or another engine, or giving up.
- 80% f unsuccessful searches are followed with keyword refinement.
- 41% of searches unsuccessful after the first page choose to refine thir keyword search phrase or their chosen search engine.
- 77% of search users choose organic over paid listing when searching, 67% choose organic search when purchasing.
- When the searcher is purchasing, organic click-through generates 25% higher conversion rates than equivalent Pay-Per-Click (PP) click-through.
- 40% of SEO campaigns aware of their ROI achieve returns in excess of 500%, while only 22% of PPC campaigns were able to achieve this value.
- Daily use of search engines rose from 33% in 2002 to 59% in 2005. The average day in 2005 reported 60 million people using a search engine. As of March 2007, Google accounts for 64% of US searches and 77% of UK searches
The validity of these statistics depend on various experimental factors (i.e. large, representative samples of searchers/searches), and on accurate statistical analysis.
For more in depth analysis, the sources for this article were:
Please post addition figures or sources, or your view, in the comments.
The latest figures on Google’s market share compared to its primary search competitors Yahoo, MSN, and Ask (formerly Ask Jeeves) have been published by Hitwise. As always, the numbers are astounding, revealing that Google holds a 77% market share, meaning overthree quarters of UK internet searches are made through Google. Yahoo is now holding 8%, and while MSN and Ask are both at 5% and falling.
Comparing the UK to the US figures, for which Google has just broken 66.6% or two thirds market share, it’s clear that UK internet searchers even more than US searchers turn first to Google.
A collective 23% is not to be sniffed at, but clearly firms services the UK market and requiring SEO services should look first to SEO specialists with strong results in google.co.uk.
Technorati Tags: seo, uk, search engine market, google, yahoo, msn
This is a great image from an eye-tracking experiment that clearly demonstrates the importance of organic SEO. Check it out.
If you are still using just hits and pageviews to measure your website’s performance, it’s time to ask yourself a few questions about how well you understand the performance of your website. How do these metrics contribute to understanding of how well you are acheiving your business objectives? eMarketing is just like offline marketing, in that requires measurement followed by optimisation. Only better, because we have more data.
Thus, central to every web project should be a Website Performance tracking sheet outlining targets and progress across a variety of measures that together communicate to your web management teams a picture of performance towards objectives. Use your imagination to find those indicators that provide into the performance of your website.
Below are a few alternative metrics to get you thinking. Do you know how well youre website is performing? What would your targets be?
- New Referrers
- Basket Size
- Repeat Purchase Count
- Number of Commenters / Comments
- Other Content Contributions
- Monthly Membership Registrations
- Newsletter Subscriber Count
- Click-Thrus from Newsletter Links
- Number of Social Bookmarks (i.e. Diggs)
Update: Bud Caddell has also written a post about website performance indicators along similar lines over at seoMoz.org, with a more exhaustive list.
