Pay-per-click and paid search advertising

In order to get the most from your search marketing, you should align your pay-per-click (PPC) activities with search engine optimisation (SEO). SEO promotes websites in the natural listings of search engines so that users can find your website when they do a keyword search.

An effective search marketing campaign should include elements of both SEO and PPC to boost your website's visibility in search rankings. This will ensure you are taking advantage of the way search engines work. The general principles of SEO are to:

• submit your new site to search engines to make sure that it is indexed
• increase the quantity and quality of links pointing to your site
• design your site to be usable, accessible and easy to navigate

Ultimately, having high-quality content on your site will aid all aspects of your search marketing - by attracting visitors and encouraging third parties to link through to your website.

See content marketing.

Keyword strategy

Keyword research is central to any PPC campaign. In order to succeed at PPC - and to improve your organic search ranking - you need to find out which words and phrases your potential customers use when they search online for products or services like yours.

Search engines evaluate keyword bids and website rankings. To reach a good ranking, you'll need to make the right bid and:

• Get a good click-through rate (CTR) for your ads. CTR is the percentage of people who click through on your ads against the number of times the search engine displays them. You can achieve this by using compelling ad copy that closely relates to chosen keywords.
• Include your keywords throughout your website. Keep your keywords up to date by adding variations to match changing search terms. It is important that keywords only appear in a natural way within your content. Overloading your content with keywords is known as 'keyword stuffing' and can cause your site to be penalised by search engines.
• Enter your website address into the free search engine tools to have them analyse whether your content includes keywords you haven't previously identified and add them to your lists.
• Use SEO tactics so your website benefits from the way in which search engines work.
• Add value to your website through useful, relevant content that is regularly updated.

It is important to find the best keywords for your business. You can buy software or use providers who will analyse keywords for you and there are things you can do for yourself such as using free keyword checking from major search engines, research keywords on other relevant websites. Also consider negative keywords - the words you need to disallow to prevent your advert appearing in unrelated searches.

Keyword strategy should sit at the centre of your search marketing strategy, as it is vital to both SEO and PPC.