We have looked at the several forms of Internet marketing, and how to utilize them to increase your profits and influence in business.

If you have been following, you must have realized. all these articles have been targeted towards individuals and businesses in Ugandans, but actually the knowledge inside each article ,can be used by almost any business, anywhere.

This is just let you know, these principals can be applied in the same way  in any other coutry like Kenya, Tanzania, South Sudan, East Africa, and the world at large.

With out wasting any time, let’s talk what exactly Search Engine Marketing is.

Search Engine Marketing in Uganda.

It’s the paid version of getting your website to Search engine result pages(SERPs), Commonly known as SEO -Search Engine Optimization

Remember social media marketing? Then, you’ve got to remember what i termed as PPC Advertising. Search engine marketing works under the very same model, but for search engines instead of social media.

This is one of the most under utilized, internet marketing method in Uganda. Even when talking about Kampala as the Capital City, you don’t see Companies in Kampala use it-enough. Yes, it is being used at some level, but even so, it is mostly used by companies from other nations-Ugandan internet Users, or by companies are already big and rich companies that can afford to put a few monies from their marketing budgets.

In this kind of marketing, you don’t have to work hard to get your business found on SERPs. Just place your advert on any results page of your choice, target it to an audience you choose at any time you want. All you need is the money to pay in exchange for each click-through to your website.

I have to say though, this is not as easy as it sounds. To explain better, I will use the most popular search engine in Kampala, the rest of Uganda and the world at large, Google (www.google.com).

If any one hasn’t come across a search engine, at least they have hard of the word “Google”. So, I’ll use the famous search engine to explain how search engine marketing works.

PPC – Pay Per Click Advertising in Uganda

If you remember how PPC works in Social media marketing, i’m sure this to you is no brainer, because pay per click works in the same way across the internet. It doesn’t matter what platform you want to advertise on, the logic is simply—Pay money to the advertising platform, for every user that clicks through to your website.

Google AdWords in Uganda

It is Google’s own advertising platform, that allows you to automatically place your adverts on search engine results pages (SERPs) of your choice by paying for each click through to your website.

In a way, the description given above is limited, for one reason. Google Adwords also places adverts in form of text, images, and video to what it terms as GDN—Google Display Network, which is a combination of it’s own other websites like Google Finance, Youtube, Gmail, blogger and the millions of websites across the internet, by app and website owners, who wish to make money by displaying your adverts on their websites or inside smartphone apps.

So, How does it work?

It’s simple, You pick a single or set of key words/phrases that people might come searching for, then create an advert for your website. Google will display it in the paid section, on the key word/phrase you chose.

Keep in mind, It is very rare that you’re the only business with need to serve adverts to people who search terms in your specific industry. Because of this, google often places a large number of adverts to specific SERPs with high competition for the specific keyword(s).

Now you may wonder, how large is the number of adverts, what if you have 1000 businesses all competing for the same keyword? No google won’t display all the 1000 adverts on that single page, it will determine which advert shows and when, based on how much you bid for it, and an AI-Artificial Intelligence powered calculator that determines a quality score for all submitted adverts.

What is Quality score and how does it work?

It is how google determines your advert’s relevance and usefulness to the person searching a specific keyword/phrase. How this works is by a number of variables, some of these could be clicks count since your advert started—also known as Click-Through Rate (CTR), how relevant your landing page/website is to the keyword, how long people stay on your landing page, etc,

An example of this would be if our business sells insurance, but we try to pay for a keyword like “Visite Uganda”, Google knows your business is not about tourism because of the content in both your advert and on your website, and for this it will give an actual tourism website a higher relevance score for this specific keyword.

A better sore for the keyword/phrase “Visit Uganda” would be an actual tourism business located in Uganda with a website, but the advertiser also goes ahead to direct this advert to a page detailing to the person how a visit to Uganda is like and giving them information on how to apply for the next tour..

The logic is really simple. Have a higher quality score, and you stand a better chance to beat even the biggest competitor bids to your customers.

How does Bidding work?

So we know that you pay Google for clicks to your website (PPC), right? Bidding is how you pay for each click you get. It’s the price you’re willing to pay per click for the specific keywords/phrases you choose.

Through the Google Adwords web interface, you can choose what key words you will buy clicks for, and also decide on how much you will pay for each click. You can specify the maximum amount, or choose to let Google determine how much you bid within your budget—theoretically supposed to bring you the most clicks possible within that budget.

In conclusion.

Whether you sell B2B—Business to Business, or B2C—Business to Customer, whether is is in ther center of Kampala, the north of Uganda, South east or west, Search engine marketing is important for your business and can cause a great increase in your profits and influence if done right. The reason is simply because every internet user has used a search engine, and it will only increase in Usage as smartphones and technology advances in our country.

Just remember to know what you are doing or you’ll spend monies and monies with out a good Return on Investment (ROI).

 

This Article was re-modeled from a book by Peter E. Bampaire, Called “Internet Marketing In Under 1 Hour“

 

Any questions/Inquiries, Drop them in the comments section below. Thanks for reading.