What Are Search Marketing Services?

Search marketing is a vital component of a holistic modern marketing strategy. In the good ole days, consumers turned to friends or family for recommendations when looking for a new business. Today, they turn to their old pals Google, Yahoo!, and Bing.

People are searching on the go from their mobile devices, reading through reviews from existing customers to narrow down the field of potential businesses, and relying on both paid and organic results to find the companies best suited to solving the problem they have. But search marketing, including paid and organic efforts, takes a lot of time. There are dozens of moving parts within each type of strategy and a lot of technical knowledge needed to get a great search marketing strategy off the ground.

That’s why a lot of businesses turn to search marketing service providers. These companies are fully immersed in the wide world of search and have the knowledge, tools, and bandwidth to help any business get the most out of their search campaign. Let’s take a look at the reasons you need search marketing services for your business.

Search Marketing Is Always Changing

The major search engines’ algorithms are constantly changing. Google, for example, has hundreds of factors it considers when determining which sites to show in SERPs. And the weight it gives to these different factors changes often. If you’re not living and breathing SEO, it’s easy to miss out on the latest best practices and to fall behind in SERPs as a result.

For example, before 2012, some businesses employed something called keyword stuffing, where they would essentially “game” the search engines by inserting random keywords into their content. The result was that it was practically unreadable for humans — it wouldn’t make sense and was not valuable at all, but search engines couldn’t decipher the difference, and those sites performed really well in search engines.

Then, in 2012, search engines got privy to what was happening and made an algorithm change (Google Penguin) that essentially wiped these sites off of SERPs completely until they made changes to the content on their sites. And since then, Google and other search engines have continued making updates like this to enhance searchers’ experiences — with some negative consequences for a lot of business websites.

Paid search isn’t immune to updates, either. Search engines are constantly adding new ad types, refining their bidding processes, redesigning their analytics platform, and more. Keeping up with the ever-changing landscape is almost a full-time job. If you’re already running a business, staying abreast of the latest search marketing trends and industry changes is a big ask.

An expert whose whole life is search marketing knows about changes long before a business owner or marketing director, who has dozens of other tasks on their plate, will hear about it. And with a search marketing company on your side, you can capitalize on those changes long before your competitors have them on their radar screen.

Great Search Marketing Strategies Take Bandwidth

A complete search marketing strategy involves a lot of moving parts. SEO, PPC, content creation, tracking search engine analytics, and conversion rate optimization are all pieces of the large and intricate puzzle.

Unless you’re a global brand with a small marketing army, it’s very difficult to dedicate the internal resources necessary to keep these vital components of great search marketing running smoothly. Even if your team did somehow manage to stay on top of every last change to search marketing best practices, acting on those changes is a whole other matter.

And because search is always changing, you can’t undertake a “set it and forget it” approach to your marketing. You must have the time to analyze, optimize, and redeploy campaigns constantly to get the most out of search marketing efforts. A search marketing partner has the time and attention to dedicate to creating a strategy and keeping it updated over time.

Certifications Matter

Google, Yahoo!, and Bing offer marketers the option to get certified. You might hear these certifications tossed around and wonder what they mean.

Search marketing is a major area of interest for most businesses, so a lot of marketers brand themselves as SEO or PPC experts. Unfortunately, some of them aren’t really qualified to do so. That’s where the certifications from the major search engines come in.

It’s in the search engines’ best interests to have highly knowledgeable people creating ads on their platforms. That guarantees a higher ad quality, ensuring their customers are happy with their search experience.

The certification process is a way for marketers that truly do know their stuff to be recognized and have a more official way of proclaiming their expert status. All marketers in the partner programs have a tested track record managing advertising campaigns for a lot of businesses, so you can rest assured that they’ll do right by your company, too.

We at LOCALiQ are proud to say that we hit all the right marks when it comes to search marketing. We have the certifications and a team of experts who are dedicated to working alongside your team to drive incredible results for your company. Seriously, our experts live and breathe search engines! If you need a helping hand with your search marketing, why not check out what we can do for you?

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Stephanie Heitman

Stephanie is the Associate Director of Content for LocaliQ and WordStream. She has over 10 years of experience in content and social media marketing and loves writing about all things digital marketing. When she’s not researching the latest and greatest marketing news and updates, she’s probably watching reality TV with her husband, reading, or playing with her two pups.