Search Engine Marketing In 5 Easy Steps
When it comes to search engine marketing there are some dos and don’ts. But we tend to think in terms of principles. You can get started with search engine marketing in just a few simple steps and it’s not that hard. Be prepared, however. You will need to spend some money.
- Step 1: Make a tentative plan. Don’t just wing it. Search engine marketing involves planning and execution. Your first step should be to plan.
- Step 2: Research. Why is this step second? Because you really should know what general direction you are headed before you start your research. The research will guide you in a more specific direction. What kind of research? Competitive. Keyword. Opportunity.
- Step 3: Adjust your plan. This is where you hone the details. Take your research and make the best plan you can. Include a budget and be specific about your goals.
- Step 4: Open accounts. You’ll need accounts with pay per click companies. Set up your accounts based on your budget set in step 3.
- Step 5: Implement. Remember, it isn’t all about pay per click advertising. Search engine marketing also involves organic search. Make sure they work together.
Now that you know the steps to get started in search engine marketing, why waste time?
Should You Bid On Competitor Brand Names?
There is a heated controversy that has been raging for several years about the practice of bidding on competitor brand names for your search engine marketing campaigns. One camp says it is trademark infringement. Other professionals claim it is perfectly acceptable and likens it to setting up a similar business across the street at a busy intersection in the real world. Who is correct?
There is no easy answer and it is one that you will likely have to answer for your own business if you intend to engage in search engine marketing. You may have competitors bidding on your brand name, but should you bid on theirs?
We won’t tell you how to run your business, but we believe in ethical marketing, which is not deceptive and which is based on a strong commitment to “playing clean”. Competition is tough, and it should be, but it should also be fair. The honest truth is, there are enough keywords in any niche to bid on that bidding on the competition’s brand name isn’t really necessary. But that’s a decision you’ll have to make for yourself. And I hope your sleep habits don’t change.
Facebook Fan Pages As Search Engine Marketing Tools
A new survey shows that Facebook fan pages are effective marketing. This may come as news to some people, but it’s not surprising. What is really surprising is that there was no mention of Facebook fan pages as search marketing tools.
With Facebook, profiles and fan pages are generally indexed in the search engines, but not much else. If you build a highly optimized Facebook fan page then you could see that fan page rank well in the search engines and that could lead to additional business for you. That’s why so many businesses are flocking to Facebook to build fan pages. They are not only effective but good search marketing vehicles.
Why SEM Changes So Much
Search engine marketing is in a constant state change. This may seem a bit odd. Wouldn’t the search engines benefit more by keeping things steady and constant? Not really and it’s a simple matter to understand why.
There is a constant tug of war between the search engines and webmasters trying to get their pages to rank well. But there are different types of webmasters. Not all of them play fair.
The first type of webmaster is the run-of-the-mill webmaster who just wants to run legitimate business. This type of webmaster doesn’t really have the time to learn everything there is about marketing to search engines, but they do take out time to learn what they can. Their goal is to rank as well as they can and not try to game anyone.
The second type of webmaster is the professional search engine marketer. They spend their time studying the search engines, testing different techniques and doing their best to stay on top of the latest changes.
A third type of webmaster is the “blackhat” practitioner. Like the professional SEMer, he spends his time learning the latest techniques and keeping up with search engine ranking changes. However, this type of webmaster will use any technique at his disposal to gain an edge in the rankings. He doesn’t care if the search engines approve of his tactics or not.
Then there is the spammer. This type of webmaster is simply careless. And sloppy. And somewhat lazy. She won’t take the time to study the search engines. She just learns what the popular theories are of the day and chases rumors without testing them. This webmaster will likely have a few websites de-indexed then wonder why.
Finally, there is the clueless. This webmaster doesn’t know the first thing about how search engines work. He just builds his website and hope people show up to look at it.
The search engines, first and foremost, want to show good search results to searchers. But they also want to be fair to each of the types of webmasters above. And to do that, there must be some kind of way to ensure that no one games the search engines to gain an unfair advantage. That’s why the search engines penalize the use of careless tactics and those that attempt to game the results.
But it would not be fair to allow the professional search engine marketers an opportunity to gain advantage over everyone else by letting them in on all the ranking secrets and shutting everyone else out. So the search engine frequently change their ranking algorithms to wipe out the advantages of the professionals and to ensure that no one games the results for an unfair advantage.
This means it is even more important to study and test to see what works – not just for today, but for all time.
Search Engine Marketing: Who’s In Control?
Are you in control of your search engine marketing campaigns? If not then who is?
The key to getting ahead and staying ahead in search engine marketing is to know the game. If you are not staying on top of changes in the industry – and they happen every day – and adjusting your marketing based on the direction of the search engines then you are not really in control of your marketing. You can be in control or the search engines can be in control, but not both.
Of course, you could give control of your marketing to someone else entirely and hope things go well. But it needs to be someone you trust. Is there a search engine marketing company you trust well enough to run everything without question? If you do hire a company to run your marketing campaigns, make sure you hire a company who is knowledgeable of the latest search engine marketing tactics and is good at communicating with you. They’ve got to keep you informed.
Will Social Search Change Search Engine Marketing?
Search engine marketing has been going strong for a few years now. Social search is just getting off the ground. In fact, Google has made it a point to tackle social search and lead the charge. Only, there are some people who aren’t so impressed with how they’re doing it.
But let’s say that social search were a perfect animal – like organic search (I’m kidding, OK?).
At any rate, let’s just say that social search was at least as good as organic search has been when at its best. Would search engine marketing be any different? Would social search change the nature of search engine marketing? I’m betting it would.
Remember, there are two branches of SEM: Paid search and organic search. How would each of these change with social search? My guess is that each would change in a real sense, but not necessarily in a fundamental sense.
Here’s what I mean: PPC is based in large part on the principles of organic search. You do your keyword research, write a few targeted ads, and watch your rankings based on search engine ranking factors. Social search, however, isn’t anything like that. You still might do your keyword research, but you aren’t so much concerned with rankings. You are concerned with connections. So how will that change search engine marketing?
I think one very important way that search engine marketing will change when social search reaches full maturity is that brands will no longer need to feel threatened by lesser companies who are better at SEO. Brands can actually put more emphasis on their company culture and focus on the benefits of doing business. That’s as it should be.
Why Search Engine Marketing Can Save The World
If you’ve been watching what’s going on with Google lately, it looks as if the company may pull out of China over cybersecurity and human rights issues. If it happens, that will drastically change the dynamics of the world wide web. It will certainly be noticeable in China where Google has 30% of the search market share.
Today I noticed on Google a link below the search box to “Information, resources, and ways you can help survivors of the Haiti earthquake.”
Search engine marketing is more than buying clicks. First and foremost, it’s about using the search engines to get your message across. That includes organic search and paid search.
Both of these incidents – the large one and the small one – affect search engine marketing in some way. If Google pulls out of China, that will leave a lot of businesses in China with one less alternative for reaching their customers. It could also slow down progress toward a more open China. And Google’s link to more information about helping the Haitians is the perfect example of how search engines can be used to make a difference in the world. That’s true even if, maybe especially if, you own the search engines.
Search engine marketing continues to be a growth industry. It is not today what it used to be and it won’t be tomorrow what it is today. Keep you eye on the changing nature of the web and look for opportunities to make your search engine marketing efforts better and more effective than ever.
Will Search Engine Marketing Merge With TV?
Screenwerk has a great read here on the Internet on TV.
Imagine sitting in front of the tube watching your favorite TV show and up on the screen (in the corner of the screen so as not to interfere with your viewing) comes a little popup box. It’s your friend who lives thousands of miles in L.A. sending you a chat message through Facebook. You type a message into your remote control to let him know that you are watching a show and you’ll chat in fifteen minutes.
A couple of minutes later you get a another popup box. It’s your mother on Skype. You shout at the TV, “I’ll call you in 30 minutes!” OK, she hangs up.
Across the bottom of the screen you see little text ads scroll by every five to ten minutes. You calmly say to yourself, “Those ads are really annoying.” But then you remember those $60 cable bills. One of the ads, much to your chagrin, catches your attention. (Those ads are provided by Google, by the way.) You pick up your remote and click the ad – a little popup box appears in the top left corner. You’ve been taken to the advertiser’s website.
Since you are still watching your show, you leave it the way it is. When the show is over you send a message to your Facebook friend, “Let’s chat.” You dial your mother on Skype. And you enlarge the website panel in the corner of your TV so that it takes up the full screen. What a multi-tasker you are!
Is this the future of Internet TV? Will you someday be able to chat, talk on VOIP and surf the Internet all on TV? Gone are the commercial breaks, gone are the cable channels and their high-priced monthly bills. Programs are paid for by revenue made from pay-per-click ads. Search engine marketing is bigger and more effective than ever. Can you see it? Am I dreaming? Is it possible?
Search Engine Marketing Is More Than PPC
When a lot of people think about search engine marketing they immediately think about pay per click marketing (PPC). That is a part of it, but that’s not all there is to effective SEM. Search engine marketing is any type of marketing done through search engines, and that includes display advertising.
Of course, display advertising is probably the least effective of SEM strategies. Most small business owners are beginning to realize that now. But search engine optimization ranks as still one of the most effective search engine marketing strategies, and I suspect it always will be.
In some sense, social media marketing can be considered SEM. Real-time search is definitely search engine marketing. Video and image optimization are search engine marketing strategies too. As is mobile marketing when done the right way.
So you can that you have options beyond PPC. Search engine marketing is more than tossing money at keywords, it’s really about devising a strategy for drawing in new customers through the search engines.
Search Engine Marketing: The New Telemarketing
Search engine marketing is becoming an integral part of doing business. Not just business online, but business in general. And the reason it is becoming so important for businesses who want to get ahead and stay ahead is because there are so many people online now and more and more going online every day. People are starting to trust the Internet.
It took awhile, but it’s happening. Search engines are becoming as ubiquitous as utility companies. They’re accessible from anywhere and they have all the answers.
Well, maybe not all of them. But all of the important ones.
Remember when telemarketing became all the rage? Every company that wanted to increase its position in the marketplace conducted a telemarketing campaign. Then consumers started blocking the calls, or acquired Caller ID and didn’t answer the phone. Then, e-mail marketing became popular. Search engine marketing is the new telemarketing. If you want to get ahead, this is where it’s at.
But how do you do it? It’s not easy. Like telemarketing, it looks easy, but it is something that you’d better learn in a hurry or let the professionals do it. When it comes to search engine marketing, who do you trust?
Will Search Engine Marketing Move Into Real-Time?
Yahoo! was one of the companies that pioneered search engine marketing. Back then it could be called directory marketing. It was one of the first companies to use paid inclusion and the company still relies on paid inclusion to some degree. But not as much as it did in the late 1990s.
Since purchasing Inktomi, Yahoo!s search technology, and Overture, which used to be WordTracker’s main competition, Yahoo! hasn’t really done anything innovative. They dropped Google as their primary search technology provider in 2004 and that kind of sealed the deal on their own fate. It might have been the biggest mistake Yahoo!s ever made. Since then they’ve done nothing but trail and slip.
Recently, however, Yahoo! announced that they’ve incorporated Twitter into their search results, providing Yahoo! searchers with real-time results. There’s nothing innovative about that. Both Bing and Google beat them to the punch. But Yahoo! did do it a little better.
Yahoo!s incorporation of Twitter into its search results includes an algorithmic formula for obtaining relevance to the search query. You’d have thought that Google would be the first to do that. No, it was Yahoo!
Now the question is, where will search engine marketing go from here? If searchers can rely honestly on relevant real-time search results, will that spawn a whole new industry of spam, or will it lead to greater search satisfaction? Will Yahoo!s reputation climb as a result of this new industry development?
My guess is that Bing and Google will respond with a relevance algorithm attached to their real-time search results as well. Search engine marketing, in the future, will likely be real-time based to some extent. But by how much?
Link Building As A Search Engine Marketing Tactic
Search engine marketing is the practice of influencing a website’s rankings by increasing their visibility in the search engines. It is generally thought of as existing in two branches: Paid search and organic search.
Link building falls into the organic search model, which generally is defined as the process of building web pages with search engine optimization in mind and increasing a page’s chances of ranking higher in the search engine results. On-page factors alone generally are not enough to hold search engine rankings long term. Hence, the reason for link building.
Link building seldom does well by itself, however. A poorly defined website with poorly written content will not be made better with great link building. If your link building succeeds you will only be successful at driving traffic to poor websites.
But if your website is well written, has a great design, and your on-page SEO is excellent then great link building can give your site a real boost in the search engine rankings. And if you do any paid search marketing, your paid ads existing alongside your organic search listings will be much more effective. That’s when you know that your search engine marketing efforts are really paying off.
Hitwise Offers Competitive Intelligence Analysis
Hitwise, one of the most credible companies reporting on competitive intelligence issues, cites some interesting stats from the past couple of months. First, if you are a part of certain industries such as automotive, sports, entertainment, business and finance, news and media, and social networking then your industry has experienced a double-digit increase in the percentage of traffic coming from search engines. The same industries also saw a double-digit increase in the amount of traffic coming from Google. These stats are a comparison between October 2008 and October 2009.
This just simply proves that search engine traffic is still good today. And it doesn’t look like any other traffic source will pass the search engines any time soon.
As far as competitive intelligence goes, the best way to use this information is as a benchmark. If you are below your industry average then perhaps you need to step up your search engine marketing. If you are well above your industry average then you can take that as a sign that you are doing well at search engine marketing. That doesn’t mean you couldn’t improve.
There is more than one way to gather useful competitive intelligence. One way is to get your hands on information that you can use as a benchmark. It may not reveal anything about any specific competitor, but if it helps you better understand where you fall within your industry then it’s good information.
In Search Marketing, You Gain Control By Giving Up Control
It doesn’t seem possible, but this is one of those zen aphorisms that rings true because it’s so contradictory. Give up control and gain more control. That’s how search engine marketing works.
Typically, small businesses start off building their website knowing just where they want to go. And that’s the problem. They do the keyword research. Narrow down the list of keywords to target. Write great content for their website. Do the requisite promotions. And no one shows up to buy anything. Why?
The problem is you have too much control. Give it up.
And here’s how you give up control. You simply let the customer have it. They know what they want. They’ll search using the phrases that are important to them, not the ones you’ve picked out of a line up. Your customers will purchase what you have to offer if you offer what they are looking for. So quit guessing and ask what they are looking for. Then provide it.
The way to be successful at search engine marketing is to give up control and to let your customer have it. When you do that, you’ll gain control over your success in the best kind of way.
Search Engine Marketing Management: The Real SEM
Search engine marketing (SEM) has only been around for about a decade, or just a little bit short of it. Online journalist Danny Sullivan first introduced the term in 2001. Since then, search engine marketing has grown by leaps and bounds.
At its core, SEM consists of paid search and SEO – search engine optimization. Early SEM professionals spent most of their time focusing on driving traffic to websites and increasing the number of site visitors. That, however, has proved to be an unprofitable venture as high numbers of traffic do not necessarily lead to conversions. That’s why search engine marketing management, or SEMM, has started taking hold.
SEMM professionals focus more on increasing ROI through search engine marketing efforts. If you can increase your ROI by decreasing traffic, would you?
That’s not to say that decreasing traffic is always a necessity, but sometimes you can increase profits by decreasing traffic to your website. This is done by focusing on a narrower niche or topic or by writing about your niche in such a way that it appeals to a certain subset – i.e. specialization. If you reach the right target market with increased specialization then you can increase your ROI. You may lose some traffic from people not interested in your specialty, but they weren’t likely to buy from you anyway.
SEMM involves a tighter focus on profits and ROI instead of vague concepts like traffic an site visitors.
Search Engine Marketing’s Upward Mobility
Search engine marketing is getting better and better every year, as it gets more and more challenging. The latest news is that Bing is incorporating real-time results from Twitter and Facebook into search results. Nice. We’ve been waiting for this for some time. But the interesting thing is how they are doing it.
Tweets that are deserving of rankings evidently will be weighed by a Twitterer’s follower count. That will make Twitter popularity very important.
What I do see happening down the road is a quality score for social media content. The search engines – Bing and Google primarily – will give an algorithm-based quality score to a tweet or Facebook update based on keyword usage, follower count, retweets, and other measurements of social proof. Social proof will actually become a relevant ranking factor and added to the ranking algorithms. Remember, you heard it here first. Search engine marketing is on the move.
What Compliments SEM?
Search engine marketing, or SEM, is any kind of marketing that targets the search engines. SEO, social media marketing, pay per click marketing, or paid inclusion are types of SEM that have been popular now and in the past. Are there any other forms of marketing that compliment SEM well and that should be used alongside search engine marketing to increase your brand’s online presence?
Truthfully, almost anything you do online, if it involves creating new content, can be considered SEM. That leaves off line marketing. But can it compliment SEM?
Yes, it can. Why shouldn’t it?
That’s a good question. Why shouldn’t it? Off line marketing is a great compliment to search engine marketing and provides opportunities to reach the right market for your business in ways that online marketing can’t. It’s the perfect compliment to search engine marketing. We call it integrated marketing.
How Niche Search Engine Marketing Pays The Bills
Search engine marketing is the process of using search engines to drive traffic to your web pages, primarily through search and paid search platforms. Crafty Internet marketers do this by focusing on niche-related keywords in their marketing efforts. How does that work exactly?
For starters, you’ve got to build value into your marketing campaign in your keyword research. This should be your first step in the process. Look for the best and most profitable keywords for your niche and focus your marketing efforts on those. After you’ve identified the best keywords, put them into a list and build your web pages to focus on those keywords with each page focused on a primary and a secondary keyword. Then build links using your keywords as anchor text.
Try a PPC campaign as a test campaign on one or two of your keywords and attempt to drive traffic to a keyword-based landing page. As you do this, note your CTR. If you are getting a high CTR on any keywords then focus on those keywords for building more web pages and for increasing the search engine presence of others you’ve already built.
Search engine marketing is not hard, but it is tedious. You can build value into any niche if you know the basics.
The Two Sides To Search Engine Marketing
Search engine marketing is not so easy to define, but it is simple to explain. There are really two sides of it – paid search and organic search.
Organic search has to do with natural search engine listings. Those are the results that appear when you make a query at one of the search engines. They appear down the page and centered with paid listing usually appearing above them and/or to the right or left in a sidebar fashion. Typically, searchers prefer to click on the organic listings at Google, but at MSN most of your searchers prefer the paid listings. Both are considered a part of search engine marketing.
Search engine marketing is any marketing done through the search engines. But you really want to use both paid search and organic search in your marketing strategy and make them work together. That’s easier said than done, but it is possible. If you need a guide to show you how to make the most of your search engine marketing efforts, one is just a click away.
What Is Search Engine Marketing?
Search engine marketing is generally broken into two different types of marketing. On the one side is search engine optimization. On the other side is pay per click advertising, or paid search. The primary component of search engine marketing, of course, is the practice of increasing the visibility of a website in the search engines. That could technically include more than SEO and PPC.
Many industry insiders think of SEM as primarily paid search advertising, or contextual advertising. I think there could be a case that SEM includes social media advertising in some cases.
If the intent of advertising is to influence search rankings then I’d argue that should be included in the broad definition of search engine marketing. In that case, buying links – though frowned upon by search engines – could be considered a part of search engine marketing.
However you define search engine marketing, there is one thing that all marketers online can agree on. You can’t build a web business today without it. Search engine marketing is as essential to business today as sunlight.
SEM Leads To Sales
Search engine marketing (SEM) is a powerful method of making money. Unique to online marketing, it consists of more than building a website and watching them come. SEM involves testing, driving traffic, and closing sales by generating leads through pay per click advertising, search engine optimization, and paid inclusion forms of search engine marketing.
SEM is not new. Even before Google and pay per click advertising, online marketers were using search engines to build their businesses. But SEM has become more sophisticated. It is a science as much as an art.
At its most effective, SEM can build your business in a splash, but most businesses see their revenues climb steadily. The first step to effective SEM is to build a well optimized website with a good clean design and ready to convert traffic to sales. If your website isn’t ready to convert then it doesn’t matter how much traffic you drive to it. It will all be lost opportunities.
When it comes to SEM, the best place to start is with a plan. And if you have trouble coming up with a plan on your own, you might want to consider an SEM consultant.
What Will Search Engine Marketing Of The Future Look Like?
Search engine marketing has often been defined as attempting to rank web pages in the search engines through means such as pay per click advertising, paid placements and paid inclusion. But this is a little bit of an antiquated definition.
With Microsoft taking over Yahoo!s search business and incorporating it into Bing, at least two of those strategies are nearly no longer valid. Yahoo! trumpeted paid inclusion years ago, but since search engines have gotten better at crawling and ranking web pages, paid inclusion has not be all that necessary. Any search engine marketer worth his weight in salt ought to be able to get a web page ranked without it.
So what will SEM of the future look like?
My guess is will still involve contextual advertising, or pay per click, but it will also involve some form of social media advertising. As the Web grows more into a social web with search functions, as opposed to a searchable database with social features, the search engines themselves will take on a more social role. Search engine marketing could actually become more social in nature. What do you think?
Search Engine Marketing Is More Holistic Than PPC
There’s more to search engine marketing than merely a full force pay-per-click campaign. We strongly believe that search engine marketing should be a comprehensive and holistic marketing endeavor involving various methods of marketing online. Pay per click is just one method, albeit an important one.
The advantage to using pay per click marketing in your search engine marketing plan is that you have more control over your budget and your message. You can also drive targeted traffic to your website much more quickly with PPC than you can other methods. But I’d never use PPC as the only marketing method online.
Natural SEO is still very important and you want your natural SEO efforts to compliment your PPC efforts, and vice-versa. But you might also incorporate other methods of marketing into your search marketing plan.
Usually, companies don’t think of social media marketing as a part of SEM. But it can be. If you engage your prospects in such a way that it affects your SEO and overall SEM efforts then it can be an integral part of your overall search engine marketing strategy. The key is to keep it all consistent.
What Is Search Engine Marketing?
Search engine marketing is an interesting topic. There is some confusion as to what, exactly, it means. Some people use the term synonymously with search engine optimization. Other people use it as if it is synonymous with pay per click advertising. It actually encompasses both SEO and PPC as well as any other marketing that targets search engines, such as display advertising, paid placement, and contextual advertising.
The true definition of search engine marketing is any attempt to influence search engine rankings. That’s almost anything you do.
It’s important to understand there is no “magic pill” to search engine marketing. There is no “one way” to ensure that all web pages rank high for your targeted search terms. Every web page is different and every situation is different. What works for one website may not work for another. That said, there are some general principles that you can work with to ensure that your search engine marketing efforts yield the results you are looking for.
When you are ready for search engine marketing, be careful who you listen to. Not every firm that claims to be experts in SEM can prove they know the business.
What Is Competitive Intelligence And Why Should You Focus On It?
Competitive intelligence isn’t spying on your competition. Many forms of espionage are actually illegal. You can’t, for instance, steal trade secrets. But you can use market analysis tools and other (legal) tools to analyze and compare yourself to your competition in order to make yourself more competitive. But how do you do that online?
The first step to real competitive intelligence is keyword research. Don’t just look for the best keywords for your business. Spend a little time analyzing your competition and see what keywords they are using. In some ways, competitive intelligence on the Internet is easier than in the real world.
But don’t just stop at obtaining a list of competitive keywords. You should also analyze those keywords to see if they are good fits for you. Just because your competition uses certain keywords doesn’t mean that you should. Maybe you can find better keywords for your business.
Competitive analysis also involves a careful study of other ranking factors such as link analysis, PageRank, search engine saturation, social media optimization, and social proof. All of these factors can give you an idea about where your competition stands in the marketplace. They can also give you an idea of what you need to do to be more competitive.
Once you gather all the information about your competitors then you need to analyze it and that’s the hardest part. What does your data mean? Just because a competitor appears to be beating you at search engine marketing, SEO, or another aspect of Internet marketing doesn’t mean that they are beating you where it counts. If you can get sales information and other marketing data on your competition then that will help too.
Search Engine Marketing As A Team, Not Separate Players
Search Engine Marketing may not be a science, but it can be viewed as the sum of it’s contributors, and their effect on your online marketing success. Too often, people view all of the separate Internet Marketing efforts in their own light, and fail to bring all factors into one whole focus. When it comes to maximizing your ROI, it may be tricky to determine whether a paid search campaign would benefit over a one geared towards natural search, or whether it would be better to analyze the competition than it would be to focus on expanding your own network. Whatever the case may be, the answer will likely be to test all the water.
It’s no secret that a Pay Per Click campaign can have an effect on of of natural search, and such an effect might benefit or hurt the other, but more than likely, your business will see better oportunities when its Internet Marketing efforts branch out.
The Social Media offers a network of users, and therefore potential customers or clients, that have already presented information about themselves and their interests that traditional advertisors would pay big money for. Targeting users on the Internet is easier than ever – which only means that more people are doing it – and it is therefore that much more important to expand efforts into all online marketing areas.
However, this does necessarily mean it will do you much good to pick 3 of these areas and run with them. Marketing your business online is as much about prior knowledge as it is about gathered information, which means that slow and steady will often win the race.
Let’s compare two businesses like the tortoise and the hare.
The first business wraps its efforts around a search and content driven PPC campaign, a natural search effort, the Social Media spectrum, and safeguards itself with reputation management, all the while gathering information about it’s top competitors. After a few months, they will see which effort is paying off the most, and focus primarily on that. However, they can utilize the others to support their main campaign, and during this time, they can see how various strategies affect eachother, and optimize accordingly. Additionally, their presence in the Social Media has established a brand for them, so when users see their ads, or their name in natural search results, they are more likely to visit their site.
The second business decides to pour its budget into a PPC campaign, and gathers information about their competitors. Seeing how their competition bids has given them the advantage to take that number one spot on sponsored search results, but they lack the online presence. Their click-through rate on ads is decent, but once on the site, users will generally decide to check out the other results before making a decision. Their bounce rate is high and visitor loyalty is rather low, since more than often, users will find the first business and recognize their name.
This model is just one scenario, but it illustrates the need to exapand efforts. The tortoise and the hare is a well-known story for a good reason – there is truth to the concept of taking one’s time, thinking things through, and making informed decisions.
Pay Per Click Versus Search Engine Optimization
Most of our clients have asked us to setup both PPC and SEO for their businesses because it is preferable to utilize more resources in order to get their website maximum visibility on the internet, but one thing that we certainly understand here at Reciprocal Consulting, is budget. While setting up both PPC and SEO campaigns may be optimal for most businesses, there are cases which may warrant one or the other to a greater extent, as various aspects of each type may hold more relevance to the site for which the optimization is being performed.
It is imperative to be well-informed of the differences between PPC and SEO, and which can be more beneficial to your particular business needs. This depends on a number of factors, but generally your niche is key, followed by what type of business it is, how grand a scale you intend to market to, and who your target audience is. These factors all determine which keywords will convert best, and are the backbone to any campaign, PPC or SEO.
With Pay Per Click, we utilize Google Adwords, as well as similar PPC services on Yahoo and MSN. A maximum budget can be set for such a campaign, and within that budget, we strategically bid on your keywords, targeting geographically and categorically, displaying custom ads based on the search terms entered. These ads appear on the right-hand side of the browser, under the sponsored ads of the Google search page. How it works is you only pay when a user clicks on your ad. The price you pay for the click depends on your bid, quality score, particular position of the keyword(s) in the results, as well as other factors. Ads may also be shown on the Google Content Network, featuring your ads on sites within the network, which contain content relevant to your site. These ads may also be filtered depending on which lead to more conversions and better costs per conversion.
With Search Engine Optimization, we use your niche to build links to your site, build actual page rank, and get your site to show up higher on natural search results for your best performing keywords. We also have writers on staff who utilize various article and press release sites to spread the word about your site, new products and services, as well as other pieces of newsworthy information pertaining to your business. It should be noted that there are many factors that determine page rank, and the Google toolbar does not necessarily accurately represent your actual page rank. The focus of any SEO campaign is relevant link building on a wide scale.
The differences between PPC and SEO are vast, even though the purpose of both are the same. Online visibility can be achieved in many ways by utilizing a lot of different resources, but it is important that you choose the correct methods for your particular business and its needs.
Why Social Media Optimization?
There are many ways to optimize your website through SEO and PPC, but even if your website is showing up at the top of search results, there are at least nine more ranking spots that could be pointing to you. So why bother joining the world of Social Media Optimization when you have the number one spot in search results?
- An added online presence through SMO says more about your dedication to the internet community, which in turn shows that you care more about reaching your customers.
- Depending on which SMO sites you utilize, you can reach potential customers outside of direct search results. If someone is searching Google for your niche they will be sure to find you. However, if they belong to a forum, online community or message board dedicated to that niche, they may not bother searching Google and, furthermore, anyone who finds you on those sites is guaranteed to show interest in your business and will subsequently be more likely to become a customer.
- When coupled with SEO, SMO can push your profiles, posts and contributions to various SMO communities to search results beneath your website. This is an additional protection that falls under Reputation Management, but it is just one way to protect your name.
- Having a presence on multiple SMO sites can generate more links to your website, which adds a layer of security to your top spot on searches.
Basically, Social Media Optimization is an extension of SEO that reaches a large number of more accurately targeted potential customers.
There are many things to consider before setting up an SMO campaign. Everything from which sites you utilize to what your avatar on your various profiles will be, these things all have an impact on your image. Also, choosing keywords wisely can become the difference between an excellent campaign and an ineffective one.
If you’d like to set up a Social Media Optimization campaign for your business, Reciprocal Consulting can help.