Search marketing means different things to different people. And its meaning has evolved over time. Below is a simplified version of
the evolution of searching marketing from iProspect’s perspective.
In the mid-1990's Yahoo! was launched as an online directory into which website owners could submit their Web pages for inclusion into pre-defined topic categories. Users of the Internet could then manually browse Yahoo!’s categories for the content they sought.
Next, in the mid to late 1990's the first "search engines" were created, enabling users to simply type a
keyword/phrase into an interface to perform an automated search for Internet content that was relevant to
that keyword. As a result, the activity (more technological than marketing) that website owners engaged
in to structure their site’s content and architecture so that listings for their Web pages appear high
within the search results was called search engine positioning (SEP) or search
engine optimization (SEO). The obvious goal was to drive more visitors to their websites as their listings appeared
higher in the results.
Then, in the late 1990s and the early 2000s, when search engines started offering companies the opportunity to
bid for the position that their Web page would occupy within the engines' "sponsored" results – something far more
applicable to marketers (who were familiar with paying for prime advertising space on TV, in print, etc.) – the term
search engine marketing was coined. There was no use of the phrase search marketing yet.
But there were suddenly two different types of search results – "natural" (sometime called "organic" or "algorithmic") and "paid" (sometimes called "sponsored") and as the industry began to grow, smart marketers started using both techniques to obtain positioning at the top of both the natural and paid search results. Phrases like pay per click (PPC) entered the industry vocabulary to describe paid search and even more alphabet soup was created when Yahoo! introduced paid inclusion (PI) as a hybrid form of paid and natural search results.
Finally, out of the sheer need for simplification – in the early to mid 2000s the shorter term search marketing started to be frequently used to describe marketers’ utilization of any technique or strategy to place a relevant Web page in the path of a searcher, regardless of the specific search engine or directory being used, and regardless of type of results being presented to the searcher.
Today, search marketing serves as a big umbrella under which marketers also include the generation of visibility for
their products, services or brands within: shopping comparison engines, vertical search engines, local search, video
search, image search, mobile search, etc. – as well as within social networking sites where primarily user-generated
content is being found by searchers.
Don’t be intimidated by all the terminology – or all the places content can be found. Search marketing describes any activity that
marketers engage in to ensure that online content about their brand is found by their target audience.
Click below for information about iProspect's search marketing services.
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