Knowing the Three Key Players in Search Marketing
Three main players make up the search marketing landscape, each with a different motivation. Understanding who the players are and what they want gives you a better understanding of how to make search marketing work for your business. The important players in search marketing are
Searchers: People who type search queries into search engines
Search engines: Programs that searchers use to find products, services, content, and more on the Internet
Marketers: The owners of websites and other channels that publish content and make offers to people on the Internet
As a marketer and business owner, you want to maximize the amount of traffic, leads, and sales you get from search marketing. To do this, you must give searchers and search engines what they want.
Understanding searchers’ needs
The key for both marketers and search engines is understanding the mindset of searchers. By understanding what motivates searchers, marketers and search engines can serve them better.
People use search engines every day for everything from researching a school project to looking for reviews for a big-ticket purchase like a car or home. What motivates searchers is simple: They want to find the most relevant, highest-quality web pages about anything and everything they’ re searching for, and they want to find those pages now.
If marketers and search engines can satisfy searchers, everyone wins. Searchers find what they want; marketers get traffic, leads, and sales; and search engines gain users.
Knowing what search engines want
A search engine company, such as Google, is a business, and like any other business, it must generate revenue to survive. As a result, it’ s useful to understand how search engines generate that revenue. If you understand what motivates the search engine, you can plan your search strategy accordingly.
Most search engines generate most of their revenue by selling advertising. Figure 8-1 shows a typical set of advertisements in a Google search results page.