Top 10 Search Engine Marketing Myths Busted

Search engine marketing is a broad concept that deals with marketing your website and business on search engines through paid and organic results. It comprises of search engine optimisation and pay per click advertising techniques that are aimed to help your website reach the targeted audience.

There are numerous benefits of search engine marketing for your online business. Yet many businesses fail to realise these benefits due to some misconceptions. Let us discus these myths so that your business doesn’t suffer at any cost.

Myth 1: Search engine optimisation and website optimisation are one and the same thing- Search engine optimisation is an integral part of search engine marketing. It is a process which focuses on enhancing the visibility of the website on the search engines. Many people believe that website optimisation and search engine optimisation are same concepts, however this is far from truth. Website optimisation is a part of SEO that deals with optimising the web pages of the site in order to enhance the user experience.

Myth 2: Results are guaranteed- No form of search engine marketing offer guaranteed results. While reputed SEO companies do have higher chances of delivering positive results for your website, 100% positive results are not possible. It requires intensive SEO and PPC efforts to achieve positive results. Moreover, even if your website gets a top rank on the SERPs through SEO or PPC, there is no guarantee that it will remain in that position forever.

Myth 3: Search engine marketing can be done in-house- While the process of SEM is simple in itself, its implementation is much difficult. The level of difficulty in this process makes it impossible to do it in house. You ought to take professional help from a reputed search engine marketing company that would give special focus on your project. Moreover, the consumption of time and money in in-house SEM can be way too higher than search engine marketing.

Myth 4: Off-the-shelf software can do it all- Relying completely on such a software is a big mistake because SEM requires a lot of manual work such as identifying the right set of keywords, optimising the content for these keywords, submitting the pages, analysing the ranking and updating the strategies. One cannot deny the fact that software can certainly help in automating the process and can be used for back end analysis. But the core work has to be done manually and by devoting a lot of time and continuous efforts.

Myth 5: Only focus in search engine marketing is to obtain higher page ranking-Top page ranking ensures higher visibility on the Web, yet that is not the only objective in search engine marketing. The primary focus should be to attract the targeted audience and enhance user experience so that you get more repeated visits on your site.

Myth 6: Keyword repetition can reap great benefits- This is one of the most common black-hat technique used in search engine optimisation and PPC. Stuffing the web pages with all the targeted keywords might bring you top ranking and might attract visitors initially, but if the website does not match up to the expectations of the users and has poor content quality, the bounce rate is sure to rise up. Using the keywords for more than what is necessary can only provide you superficial results.

Myth 7: In PPC, being in top position will be profitable- Unlike search engine optimisation, having top position in PPC can prove to be a rather costly idea. The number one rank in PPC means that you have to bid higher for the keywords.

Myth 8: Set it and forget it- SEM is not a one-time process that you do once and then forget. The search marketers need to continuously work on optimising the website on the search engines to get long-term benefits.

Myth 9: All search engine marketing services are alike- The strategies required in website optimisation is different from the strategies used in pay per click advertising. Therefore, adopting a single strategy for the complete search engine marketing process is not the wise thing to do.

Myth 10: Investing on Yahoo/Bing search engine marketing isn’t necessary- There is no doubt that Google is the most widely used search engine across the world. Yet countries like Australia have a large number of web users who use Yahoo/Bing search engines more tha
Google. Thus, it is important to invest in search engine marketing services that cover all the major search engines.