Optimal Search Engine Marketing Strategy Customer Behaviour (Case studies from Saudi Arabia)

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Introduction.
This study aims to explore and comprehend the enormous contribution of SEO and paid placements as an aspect of search engine tools in order to determine how each of them might raise the number of potential consumer visits to company websites.
This study will investigate optimal search engine marketing strategy and how it relates to customer behaviour. It will outline which of optimal search engine marketing strategy is optimal for companies -Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or paid placements such as Pay Per Click (PPC) -looking at two case studies from Saudi Arabia.
Searching the internet has become part of the daily lives of millions of people around the world (Johnsen, 2017). For example, many people look for information about getting directions to their intended destination (Johnsen, 2017). Beyond such mundane applications, search engines are increasingly becoming the sole or primary source directing people to search out more essential information (Sen, 2005). For this reason, search engines engage an eminent position in the online world, making it easier for people to find what they are looking for among the vast number of web pages now available (Johnsen, 2017). They are successful because they undertake the complex work of classifying the huge number of pages and list them in terms of how appropriate they are for the user's search (SERP) (Croft, et al., 2010).
With the continued rise of online life and the growing significance of websites, it has become increasingly difficult for sites trying to reach visitors/potential customer to achieve visibility (Croft, et al., 2010, P. 132). According to Kovalenko and Kuzmenko (2020), around 4 million new websites appear online every month. As a result of this astonishing rise, it has become more difficult for websites to remain visible among the competing sites without using the best available search engine tools (Kovalenko and Kuzmenko, 2020). This, in turn, makes online marketing a 'hot' topic, and with the outbreak of the coronavirus making online shopping for products and services even more intensive, online marketing has become a highly topical way to explore current trends and make future predictions about the further use of the Internet (Kovalenko and Kuzmenko, 2020). Since it broke out in early 2020, the coronavirus has caused incredible damage to physical businesses. In contrast, online marketing consumption has reportedly risen because of the limited interaction permitted in public places .
For this reason, the aim of search engines to appear higher in a search engine listing as a result of a user's search query has never been more important to fulfil (Kharat, et al., 2020, P. 620). Thus, the aim of search engine engineers is to confirm that the essential pages are indexed and, if feasible, to get the page links listed onto the first page of the search results (Kharat, et al., 2020, P. 620). Most of the well-known search engines give 10 results on the first page (Kharat, et al., 2020, P. 620). A relatively small number of users go past the first page when they search for something, so if a website is not in the top 10 results, it is effectively 'invisible' (Kharat, et al., 2020, P. 620).
The objective of this study is to understand and explore the massive contribution of paid listings and SEO as search engine tools, to examine how both can serve to raise the number of user/potential customer visits to business websites and to determine what the major challenges are with respect to when and why marketers should use paid listings and/or SEO.
The recommendations of this study can be used to guide the marketers to correct their choice of an optimal search engine marketing strategy, in turn allowing businesses to more accurately determine their online marketing budget.
This study draws on two case studies from Saudi Arabia. The reason for choosing Saudi Arabia is that most current theories and models were devised in the western world. However, as Zhu and Kraemer (2005) have pointed out, theories and frameworks that have been developed in the context of western countries should be re-examined for use in other nations and cultures, including the Arab world. This is because certain issues that might appear insignificant for western countries may actually be of great significance in other cultures. Hence the Saudi Arabian context was chosen because it represents a culture that might yield illuminating insights into an understudied area for the development of new theories and practices (Zhu and Kraemer, 2005).

Key Definitions:
The following are important definitions that will be helpful to the reader in order to understand the concepts presented in this extended essay:  Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the skill of customizing components of a website to accomplish the best feasible search engine ranking when a web user/potential customer searches for a keyword (Tsuei, et al., 2020, P. 5).  Google Search is a search engine belonging to Google Inc. Google Search is the most frequently used search engine in the world, receiving approximately 50,000 searches every second. Its main objective is to provide people with appropriate web pages based on the search query used (see Figure 1) (Tsuei, et al., 2020, P. 3).  Organic Search Results are listings that are created from the search engine's ranking algorithm on the basis of the search query relevancy, and for which the owner of the webpages does not pay a fee to Google (see Figure 2) (Tsuei, et al., 2020, P. 9).

Figure (2) Organic Search (Source: Google, 2020)
 Paid Listings (also known as sponsored listings) are advertisements that are displayed above the organic search results whenever a user's keyword query matches an advertiser's service/product. For example, Pay-Per-Click Advertising is an online advertisement for which advertisers pay fees each time a user/potential customer clicks on one of their online ads (see Figure 3) (Tsuei, et al., 2020).  Background.

 Search Engines
The Internet began to have an influence on the business world in the mid-1990s and has since gone on to make having an online presence critical for almost any business venture (Binkhorst et al., 2015, P. 214). Between 2005 and 2018, the number of Internet users grew from one billion to 4.5 billion. Initially a developed world phenomenon, this is no longer the case. For example, Africa alone saw an increase of around 2500% in 2011 alone (Kavitha andBalaji, 2020, P. 1556).
The Internet has become a place where users try to find appropriate pages while Business webpages competitive to be visible on the first page (Binkhorst et al., 2015, P. 220). In this process, search engines act as intermediaries, linking (hopefully) users/potential customers with the business web pages containing relevant and useful information, products or services they are looking for (Kavitha andBalaji, 2020, P. 1556).
According to Kavitha and Balaji (2020), more than 28 billion searches were completed on average each month as of April 2019, around 700 daily million web searches. Google search engine brings up two types of results to a search: organic and paid (Kritzinger and Weideman, 2013). This distinction raises the important question of which strategy a business should use-SEO or paid results-in order to match the business's website with users/potential customers keywords (Binkhorst et al., 2015, P. 219).
 Search Engine Optimization SEO officially began in 2000, and its relentless rise start to take place in 2005, when Google began updating their algorithm, which they continue to annually (Kasilingam and Thanuja, 2020 Nawaf, Tahani marketer try to make changes to their site in order to improve their website ranking (Kavitha andBalaji, 2020, P. 1557).
The main goal of SEO is to improve a website's ranking in the search engine results' pages (Kasilingam and Thanuja, 2020). Thus, it is important for marketers working in this field to have an essential understanding of search engine-related concepts such as 'crawling' and 'indexing' (Kavitha and Balaji, 2020) (see above in definition of key terms).
SEO is a procedure to ensure that a business's website is at -or near to the-the top of search engine results' pages when users/potential customers search for a particular keyword(s) such as products or services provided by that business (Kasilingam and Thanuja, 2020). Thus, it is important for any business website to aim to place their website on the first page in order to be visible to as many visitors who have sought out that company's products and services and are thus potential consumers (Kavitha andBalaji, 2020, P. 1558).

 Paid Listings
Over the last 15 years, paid listings such as PPC have become a way to generate revenue for search engines (Kasilingam and Thanuja, 2020). PPC is one of the most common advertising methods accessible in digital marketing (Kasilingam and Thanuja, 2020). In 2017, $78.46 billion of Google's income came from its PPC advertising service (Kritzinger and Weideman, 2013).
However, PPC can quite easily become costly when advertisers find themselves locked in a continuing competition for the most common keywords, which are, by definition, limited, or 'key' (Sen et al., 2008). Thus, it is critical for marketers to research the feasible keywords that may be used by users/potential customers searching for a specific product or service (Kritzinger and Weideman, 2013). Herein lies the significance of understanding how target audiences interact with search engines (Kritzinger and Weideman, 2013).

 Understanding How People Interact with Search Engines
Customer behavior can be defined as the study of customers and the procedures they utilize to choose products and services, comprising consumers' mental, emotional, and behavioral responses (Huang, et al., 2011(Huang, et al., , P. 1225. Consumer behavior incorporates concepts from several sciences, such as biology, chemistry, economics and psychology (Huang, et al., 2011(Huang, et al., , P. 1225. In search engines, the key for businesses is not only to target phrases or terms in SEO, but also to learn more about their customers. Businesses' target customers play an important role in the SEO procedure (Huang, et al., 2011(Huang, et al., , P. 1227 and are something that marketers must take into account before building their SEO strategy as it enables them to create an awareness of the psychology of their target customers as well as identify how they use words and phrases to acquire information about the products or services that businesses provide (Huang, et al., 2011). Thus, the more effectively businesses Nawaf, Tahani comprehend how their target audience uses search engines, the more effectively they will be able to reach and hold on to those users (Huang, et al., 2011(Huang, et al., , P. 1228.

Research Problem
Research indicates that marketers invest far more in PPC than in SEO. Marketers explain this by the fact that SEO is more expensive to implement than PPC and does not consistently result in high rankings (Rayappa, 2020). Indeed, one study illustrates that 86% of SEM campaigns is spent on PPC versus only 12% on SEO (Mala et al., 2020). This suggests that marketers perceive PPC as the more effective means of achieving increased click-throughs. This claim is supported by a recent study indicating that even if the cost and ranking of SEO and PPC were equal, PPC would still be the more effective marketing strategy because it leads to a higher Return on Investment (ROI) (Kharat et al., 2020).
However, empirical evidence shows that PPC may not be the best SEM strategy for online marketers. Some studies have claimed that SEO might lead to more click-throughs than PPC (Puthussery 2020; Rayappa 2020; Das 2021). For example, research conducted at Puthussery (2020), has conferred that search engine users tend to ignore PPC results. Another study found that marketers who have not yet invested in SEO could be missing out on over 65% of potential customers. In the same study it was also stated that over three times as many search engine marketers generate a higher ROI from SEO than from PPC (Rayappa 2020). This finding was confirmed by Das (2021), who noted that organic results (and hence SEO) are more relevant to e-commerce searches than PPC results. The authors stated that online marketers should more carefully refine their marketing campaign to potential customers and should not ignore SEO. This suggests that SEO can generate more traffic than PPC.
Despite these findings, the literature has shown that online marketers invest more in PPC than in SEO. The reason for this is that SEO is more costly to implement than PPC and does not consistently result in a top-ranking listing. PPC is perceived as a more effective means of achieving ultimately more traffic and increased visibility. This is despite the fact that empirical evidence from the studies sketched above purports to show that PPC might not be the optimal SEM strategy for online marketers. This creates a dilemma as to which form of SEM is more effective. Hence, the research problem can be reformulated as the following Table 1:

It is not clear whether marketers must spend more resources such as budget on SEO or on PPC to raise their exposure to potential customers.
What is the optimal search engine marketing strategy for companies: SEO or paid placements

Case Study Findings
To produce statement on what is the optimal search engine marketing strategy for companies: SEO or paid placements. When and why are SEO or paid placements a better option for marketers?

Case Study Findings
To produce when and why are SEO or paid placements a better option for marketers?
This section has covered the set out this study's research problem, the significance of online marketing and having an online presence for a business, and the choices facing businesses' regarding their online marketing strategies. The rest of the study contains five sections. Section Two provides the background to the research problem. Section Three is a review of the relevant and recent literature on the subject. Section four sets out the study's methodology/approach. Section five analyzes and discusses the findings of the research. The final section discusses a number of conclusions and offers a recommendation for businesses.

Search Engine Marketing
According to Tiwari (2020), search engine marketing aims to improve the page ranking of a website to make it visible at the top of search engine results, thereby attracting new users/potential customers and increasing the visits to the webpage (Tiwari, 2020). There is no doubt that the online environment has transformed business, something noted as early as the late 1990s (Kavitha andBalaji, 2020, P. 1559). Confirming this, Duggal (2020) pointed out that whereas it took telephone technology four decades to achieve a 29% market share, the Internet has been able to do this in just six years.
Rayappa (2020) noted that searches in search engines have become more significant nowadays. Additionally, he found that the majority of all users come from search engines to the business websites. Thus, search engines play an essential role among companies looking for their webpages to be more visible for their target users. Tiwari's (2020) research confirmed that search engines could be beneficial instruments for e-commerce firms to reach their potential customers. As Ohol (2020) notes, search engine marketing is highly competitive, meaning there are many firms that are competing to get a high ranking, preferably on the first page of results. This competitive environment leads to costs potentially being much higher than the return on investment (ROI), in particular for small firms. In addition to reaching a vast number of potential customers, another advantage of having an online presence is that it makes it feasible for businesses to measure everything about what their customers do before, during, and even after they shop/purchase (Ohol, 2020, P. 198). This is a service provided by Google Analytics, which has made it possible to interpret and record everything that users/potential customers do while they are on your website (Ohol, 2020). Now, marketers are able to understand and use to their commercial advantage the steps that lead to actual online sale, allowing them to expand opportunities to transform visitors into paying customers (Ohol, 2020, P. 198). Ohol (2020) pointed out that search engine marketing spending of $40.6 billion in 2018 was expected to increase by 35.4% in 2020, to $68.8 billion. A study by Duggal (2020) found that in 2017, 46% of worldwide online advertising spending was dedicated to search engine marketing, with UK advertisers spending $17 billion on search engine marketing. Among the kinds of online advertising, SEM is becoming the predominant one (Rayappa, 2020). It is the fastest growing kind of online advertising. Online business has to ensure a strong presence in search engine indices in order to maximize exposure to potential customers (Rayappa, 2020).

Search Engine Optimization:
According to Malaga (2010), SEO can influence the visibility and the ranking of a business website between search results. He also found SEO to be a tool that can capture users/potential customers actively looking to find information about a product or service that a company offers (Malaga, 2010, P. 5).
For Ohol (2020), one of the main disadvantages of SEO is that Google update their algorithms annually in order to help consumers to get more accurate results. But these changes in algorithms can move a business website's ranking from, say, the first page to the third page. This is problematic because as one recent study on user behaviour pointed out that 89% of users only clicks on results in the first three pages and, moreover, 66% of users view only the entries on the first page (Kavitha and Balaji, 2020). Thus, if a website is not on the first three pages of the search engine results, it has almost no chance of being clicked on by users (Kavitha andBalaji, 2020, P. 1560).
In addition, research conducted by Rayappa (2020) in India pointed out that users are more likely to click on links that are ranked in the organic section (i.e., the results that have filtered out paid listings) of a search-results page. Another study, by Johnsen (2017), confirmed that in Germany 61% of people prefer to click on organic results.
However, most business do not invest in SEO but instead invest in paid listings (such as PPC) in order to ensure a higher ranking in the search-results (Rayappa, 2020). Kavitha and Balaji (2020) confirmed that business owners think that SEO is more expensive than paid listings because income from SEO does not cover costs. In addition, it takes far longer for SEO to obtain sufficient information in order to update a search engine marketing plan (Rayappa, 2020). In contrast, paid listings can provide very important data in a short time, making it possible to determine changes in customer search engine behaviour, which in turn allows adjustments to SEO plans (Rayappa, 2020).

Paid Listings:
Paid listings allow firms the opportunity to list their business websites on the first page of the search results (Tiwari, 2020). According to Tiwari (2020), PPC is one of the popular forms of paid listings as it allows firms to determine which keywords will make PPC advertisements appear on the page. However, firms will be charged each time a user/potential customer clicks on the advertised link (Kavitha andBalaji, 2020, P. 1561). According to Kavitha and Balaji (2020), Google Ads can offer to companies the ability to determine how much per click their company is spending for the purpose of traffic directly to their website.
According to Huang et al (2011), Google Ads might increase brand awareness by around 80%, which can make users remember your brand. Thus, 40% of brands try to raise their budget in PPC (Huang, et al., 2011(Huang, et al., , P. 1229. As a result, PPC is deemed an effective and profitable tool for marketers (Huang, et al., 2011(Huang, et al., , P. 1225. For example, according to a recent study by Rayappa (2020), for every $1 spent on Google Ads, businesses gain an average income of $2 in the USA. In addition, 65% of all clicks made by customers who plan to make a purchase come from Google Ads (Rayappa, 2020).
However, a downside of PPC is that it requires hourly or daily checks the PPC campaign such as clicks and to determine how many people have searched for the target keywords. This can take a great deal of time for marketers, in addition to the fixed costs of PPC (Tiwari, 2020).
Tiwari (2020) indicated that paid listings is one of the fastest ways to obtain data on customer behavior towards search engines, which can help SEO to discover the trend keywords that will lead SEO marketers to make the necessary adjustments to their SEO campaign (Tiwari, 2020).
However, as noted above, Google Ads is less trusted than organic results among users; some 70-80% of searchers actually ignore paid advertisements. Tiwari (2020) suggested that firms should not use the paid listings service because websites will be visible only as long as the firm is willing to pay for it.

Understanding How People interact with Search Engines:
According to Mala, et al. (2020), the first and most significant step that businesses should take when conducting a keyword research procedure is to determine the segment market. The segment market is a group of potential customers who have one or more common characteristic, such as needs, demographic, geographic location, psychological behavior, social and religious belief, interests and hobbies (Freytag and Clarke, 2001, P. 473). A segment market is grouped together for marketing purposes (Freytag and Clarke, 2001, P. 474 Hence, Suneetha and Krishnamoorthi (2009) confirmed that identifying the segment market can help online businesses to gain more customers by creating a list of keywords that the target segment might use when they search for products or service provided by businesses, as well as excluding unnecessary and unpromising keywords.

What Do Customers See When the Search Engine Listings Appear?
The literature mostly finds that customers mainly look at the links listed at the top of a search engine results' page. This attitude is sometimes called 'ranking effect' by marketing experts (Mala, et al., 2020). In addition, for the purpose of understanding where and why users look when presented with a list of search engine results, researchers have carried out experiments utilizing an eye-tracking device to assess the eye movements when looking at search engine results. The finding of these studies show that customers' eyes are mostly focused on the first three links, simply because they are the first (Mala, et al., 2020). Thus, customers are far more likely to click on results at the top not because they are the most relevant, but simply because they are at the top (Mala, et al., 2020).

Factors Influencing Consumer Behavior towards Online Shopping in Saudi Arabia:
A study by Jawa and Chaichi (2015) discovered the elements that influence the decisions of Saudi Arabian consumers to purchase from online (Saudi) retailers. They found that marketers should be aware in particular of the online payment system because credit cards are one of the most common payment methods in Saudi Arabia (Jawa and Chaichi, 2015, P. 1). Online payment systems influence online consumer decision making due to customers' feras about confidentiality issues regarding their credit card information. Thus, the seller's reputation is closely bound up with the online payment system they use (Jawa and Chaichi, 2015, P. 2).
Among the other elements noted by Jawa and Chaichi (2015) as important for buyers are the perception of consumers about the business and website design (Jawa and Chaichi, 2015, P. 4). Similarly, Eid (2011) found that website design plays a significant role in e-customer behavior in Saudi Arabia, including website content such as product/services information and ease of interface use.

Methodology/Approach. Study Method:
The method selected for this study is case studies. A case study can be defined as an intensive study of individuals and organizations or groups of individuals and organizations. The results of a case study generalize data to allow marketers to understand complicated phenomena (Binkhorst et al., 2015). Researchers describe how case studies review complicated phenomena in a natural setting to increase understanding of them (Binkhorst et al., 2015, P. 215 According Johnston et al., (1999), utilizing case studies in research makes it possible to gain access to valuable and sometimes novel information that may be of benefit to a company and which may not be obtainable in other ways. The case study method allows in-depth, multi-faceted exploration of complicated problems in their real-life setting (Cowton, 1998, P. 424). The accessibility of the case study method is widely accepted in the fields of business (Cowton, 1998). Thus, it was deemed that might generate answers to the research problem of this extended essay (Binkhorst et al., 2015). The data generated by the case studies in this research is secondary data, or data that has been gathered in the past and can be accessed by researchers such as government public service departments, business reports, and journal articles (Cowton, 1998, P. 425).

Case Studies
The two case studies in this study are two private businesses in Saudi Arabia, an Arab-Muslim country in western Asia. The current population of Saudi Arabia is 34,787,354 (Worldometers, 2020), 70% of which has a median age of 31 year (Statista, 2019). The latest report by Statista (2019) provides data that show 91.39% of the Saudi population are internet users (see Figure 4).

Figure (4) Internet user penetration in Saudi Arabia, 2017 to 2023 (Source: Statista, 2019)
The case studies are from the two real-life websites where both PPC and SEO are used as marketing methods. The two websites are from businesses competing in the same industry: Supermarkets & Grocery Stores. The names of the companies have been changed to company A and B for preserve the confidentiality of the companies. two mid-sized Saudi Arabian supermarket chains.
A Stores is a well-known supermarkets & grocery store in the capital city of Saudi Arabia, Riyadh.