Search Engine Marketing by Larry Lim

Even in tiny Singapore, a country of only four million people, uncommon words like “phonics” and “mbti” attract 6,200 and 1,500 monthly searches respectively.

Apart from the sheer amount of traffic, the other benefit is better ROI since search engine traffic is highly targeted. For example, someone searching for used cars in Malaysia and sees your used car shop in the search results will have a higher tendency to end up as a customer compared to mass advertising.

Given the above, what can you do as a marketer? The answer – Search Engine Marketing (SEM). In this article, I will attempt to give you a quick introduction to SEM, the methods, benefits and the real-world issues I have faced, in my experience as an SEM consultant.
But first, what IS SEM? It is a form of Internet marketing that involves increasing your website’s visibility on search engine results. There are two ways to achieve this goal – Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay-per-Click (PPC) advertising.

Let’s have a look at both methods using Google for illustration. After all, Google is the biggest search engine with more than 50% market share.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is optimizing your website to rank higher in Google’s search results for relevant keywords. The higher you rank, the greater the chance of being found. Although nobody knows exactly what affects your search rankings, most agree that it depends on your website’s relevance, trustworthiness, age and localization factors.
The process starts with determining the relevant keywords that are used by your target visitors in their search queries and writing your webpages to contain these keywords to improve your relevancy. Link-building, getting similar and higher-quality websites to link to you, helps increase your website’s trustworthiness. As your domain and in-coming links age over time, you get extra “trust” points.

Localizing your website is a smart strategy because you get a higher priority for local search results. One of my clients, ST701, ranks top 3 for general keywords like “property”, “jobs”, “cars” and “classifieds” on google.com.sg and as a result, receive over 200,000 monthly visitors from search engines alone.

Personally, I have also benefited from my solid rankings on Google Singapore – I currently rank #3 out of 240 million results for “seo”, just below Wikipedia. I received over 3,000 visitors through 1,900 different keywords to my website in June.

The other benefit is having a higher brand value because some people see it as an endorsement by Google. That could be the reason that despite being a freelancer and based in Malaysia, I am able to secure jobs from big Singapore companies like M1, iProperty, SPH, Popular Holdings, and agencies like Edelman or charge up to RM11,000 a month for just 25 hours of
my time.

The best part is due to the “highly-relevant” nature of search engine traffic, I never have to hard sell – clients who enquire already have an interest in my services.
However, SEO has its own disadvantages. One is that it may take up to a year for a new website to show results and the other is that if done horribly wrong, SEO can result in your website being permanently banned by Google.

There are unique applications for SEO like Online Reputation Management, where you displace negative links in search results to protect your brand. Unfortunately, some PR agencies term this as “shilling” and avoid it entirely for ethical reasons.

Pay-per-Click Advertising (PPC)

Most major search engines offer a paid inclusion program that lets you advertise on their search results, where you are charged only when someone clicks on your ad, hence, pay-per-click.

The biggest and most advanced PPC program is undeniably Google Adwords. Apart from having your ads on the search results of Google and their search partners like AOL and Netscape, you can also advertise on Google’s content network that consists of the many websites that have participated in their Adsense publisher program.

The basic starting steps on Adwords are to sign-up for an account using your credit card, create an ad text (ad copy), define the target country or region, list the keywords that you want your ads to appear for, enter your maximum bids for those keywords and specify a daily budget. That’s it!

Your ads start showing and you can even begin getting sales leads that very hour.
Google also provides advanced and updated statistics that allow you to track your campaign’s performance, down to the ROI.
However, things are slightly more complicated in practice. Although technically, your ad should rank higher if you bid more than your competitors, it also depends on your ad text and landing page relevance and trustworthiness, and also campaign performance, measured by the click-through rate.

Sometimes you may get “Google-slapped”, where you have to pay RM16 per click for example, despite being the only advertiser for a particular keyword. Then there are the trademark and other troublesome policies to contend with.
Is Google Adwords effective? Definitely, and the advertising costs can be recouped in most cases. For example, I spent RM1,200 on Adwords in January last year to sell Windows Vista and Office 2007 software. That campaign sent 7,000 clicks, resulting in 103 orders worth over RM70,000.

In conclusion, SEM is highly effective due to its reach, great targeting and low advertising costs. Singapore has been fast to catch on, where even florists want SEO and a doctor friend spends close to RM400,000 a year on Adwords! Unfortunately, the lack of ads on Google Malaysia and the absense of third party Adwords agencies tell a different story here. Will things improve? It had better be so I can start selling my services here.

Anyone need an SEM consultant?

About Larry Lim
Larry Lim is an accidental SEM consultant based in Malaysia and exports his services to Singapore – Malaysia Boleh! He made the jump from website entrepreneur to full-time consultant in 2006 because of the good money, glamour and women. He can be reached at email@larrylim.net.