The Reciprocal Consulting Blog

Search engine marketing and social media marketing have long had an interesting relationship. It’s easy to compartmentalize and say that such and such belongs here while this and that belong over there. But it’s not necessarily helping your business to do that.

Search engine marketing and social media marketing are both forms of Internet marketing. As such, they have something in common. But they also have some overlap, which means that they likely have more in common than simply categorization.

For instance, you’ve likely seen social media profiles, or even posts, updates, and tweets, in search results. That means that social media can be a form of search engine marketing. And certain social media – like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube – even have their own search features, some of which are quite popular. YouTube has even been called the second largest search engine in terms of volume.

I think someday Facebook may surpass YouTube in terms of volume of searches. But will they include off-site search in that deal?

Long story short, don’t expect to compartmentalize your Internet marketing strategies forever. You should really develop one Internet marketing strategy that pulls all of your online marketing together and crafts it such that the strategies work together – not against each other.

Do you know the difference between SEO and SEM? They seem to be synonymous terms, don’t they? Actually, there is a difference.

SEO = Search Engine Optimization;
SEM = Search Engine Marketing

There’s where the similarity ends – or begins, I might say. Now let’s move on to definitions.

Search engine optimization is the practice of using keywords, links, and other on-page and off-page factors to rank a web page in the search engines.

So what is search engine marketing? Well, it’s a bit broader term. It can encompass SEO, but it also encompasses pay per click marketing and any other form of marketing that directly relates to marketing through the search engines.

The key to marketing online is to get your search engine marketing to collaborate with your other marketing initiatives. Your PPC, SEO, social media marketing, display advertising, affiliate marketing, and any other marketing you do online should work together to brand your company and lead to more effective search engine positioning all around. If you do that well then you’ll go a long way to achieving a high impact reputation enhancing marketing drive. That’s what you want, isn’t it?

Online marketing is just another channel for your business. It’s not the only channel, but it’s an important. It will behoove you to learn the principles and then work them to your, and your customers’, advantage.

What can a search engine marketing consultant do for you? For starters, he can improve your current SEM plan just by analyzing what you are currently doing and making a few suggestions. But that’s not all. There are specific benefits to hiring a consulting firm to help you improve your search engine marketing efforts.

Here are a few of the benefits to hiring a search engine marketing consulting firm:

• You get a month-to-month contract, not a long-term contract. If it isn’t working for you, end the relationship and go your own way.
• Agency level support on all search engines.
• You also get access to all Beta programs. As an individual doing your own PPC, you may not get that privilege.
• Your marketing will be less expensive than using your in-house team. When you add in salary and benefits plus time off for sick days, etc., we’re way cheaper.
• We’re trained in all aspects of SEM. You get a full crew that can handle all your needs from PPC to SEO.
• A search engine marketing consultant is trained to understand each search engine’s unique specifications and operate within those guidelines.
• There are no sick days or vacations. When you call, someone will always be available.

Search engine marketing is one of the most important channels for marketing your business today. Hire a specialist who knows the game in and out.

Search engine marketing has as many definitions as there are marketers, and most of them are right. But what hardly gets talked about among search engine marketers is that SEM is more than just selling your stuff for a profit. You’ve got to do more than attract audiences with keywords. You are selling benefits.

No one cares about your product. No one cares about your company. No one cares about you. They want to know what you can do for them.

The question is, how can you do that with search engine marketing?

First, the two arms of SEM:

• Pay per click advertising
• Search engine optimization (organic search)

So how do you sell benefits through these two primary channels?

With PPC you’ve got to sell your benefits to get a click. Your goal is to get people to your landing page and then sell the benefits of your product there.

With organic search marketing, you use your landing page optimization to get rank your web page, build links to it, drive traffic to it and sell your benefits to your visitors to close the sale.

Search engine marketing really follows the principles of traditional marketing – sell the benefits. You just do it with modern technology.

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.

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.

A recent article in Marketing Pilgrim states that small businesses are abandoning banner advertising in favor of SEM, social media, and e-mail marketing. The big question is, Why?

It’s not hard to see, really. These are more effective ways of marketing a business online.

The Internet marketing industry has been aware of the declining value of online banner advertising for a few years now. It just doesn’t work. Mainly because of something called ad blindness. Websites users and searchers tend to block out those ads after they see them time and time again. But it’s hard to ignore your friends on social media, your captured audience in e-mail, and the higher ROI and response rates of SEM. The data proves these are just more effective means of Internet marketing.

Maybe we can say that small businesses are wising up to the ways of successful Internet marketing? If so then 2010 will likely be the year of SEM, SMO, and e-mail marketing. Do you think?

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, 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.

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.

These days, it seems like everyone has a blog. While the vast number of blogs on the Internet might seem to lessen the chances that your’s will be the victum of hacking or spamming, the greater quantity of blogs out there only encourages more of these annoying pests to attack.

In the Internet marketing world, spamming has unfortunately become a popular way to get free links, referals, etc. While legitimate Internet marketing firms such as Reciprocal Consulting look down on these sorts of black hat practices, the most annoying thing about these spammers is that some people actually click on these links, hence giving them a reason to continue to do it. If everyone knew how to spot spam and no one ever clicked a spam link, they would probably die out, but unfortunately this is not the case.

So, as long as there will be spammers and hackers, there will also be those who wish to put an end to it, and a lot of these programs are not only free, but coded specifically for your needs. The best example is a self-hosted WordPress blog. Due to ever growing popularity, the WordPress blog has become a prime target for spammers, both human and robot controlled, but by the same token, so has the number of anti-spam WordPress plug-ins increased. There are also a few other ways to protect your self hosted WordPress blog.

• Choose your password wisely- it may seem like elementary knowledge but believe it or not, many people don’t know what makes a password good. The first step is to choose something that is easy to remember, or something that you can write somewhere you will always be able to look it up if you forget what it is. Worst case scenario, you can always have the password sent to your email address, but that should only be the last resort. I personally have a password that includes numbers and letters, both lower and upper-case. The further your password is from a coherent English word or phrase, the better, which is why the combination of numbers and letter is best.
• Check your settings- The WordPress self hosted blog has a lot of built in features to help protect your blog, many of which can be found in the settings. Many times, an effort to allow more user interaction via comments on a blog will result in more spam, so what I have found to be the best settings for comments is allowing anyone to post, but first requiring myself or another admin to approve the comment. Once a comment is approved for a user, then comments from that user no longer require approval. This way, anyone who’s posted before can feel more welcome posting, which could increase visitor loyalty. There are also a number of great plug-ins available on the WordPress.com site which can help you deal with spam and security. These are conveniently organized by category, so performing a search for “anti-spam” or “security” should get you a plug-in that works the way you want it to.
• Watch Those Links- WordPress blogs have a handy feature on the dashboard that tells you who is linking to you. This is a great way to network, but also a good way to see when people are linking to you, even if you don’t want them to. Should you encounter a website that is saying bad things aboout you, or one with a large readership that might send unwanted traffic your way, you can easily see this and send a kind email over to ask the administrator at the other site to remove the link.

There are plenty of more advanced tactics to protecting your blog, but these are the most basic, and believe it or not, the ones most often overlooked.

Internet marketing takes years of experience to master and is constantly changing, therefore requiring dedication to continually grasp in full. However, there are a few basics that anyone interested in internet marketing should know. When it comes to understanding the fundamentals, it’s all in the terms. ROI, SEO, SMO, RM, CI, PPC, etc. These acronyms may mean nothing to most people but to us as an internet marketing firm they are our bread and butter.

Here is a basic rundown of our services and how they can help our clients:

• ROI (Return on Investment) – the key to any campaign in a simple question: is it worth it? The ROI is the net of what is spent on a campaign verses the increase of leads, sales, customers, etc. Depending on your niche, certain marketing campaigns may not be best suited for you.
• PPC (Pay Per Click) – refers to the use of AdWords campaigns on Google, MSN, Yahoo, etc. A PPC AdWords Campaign is the sum of keywords relevant to the client’s website, which are used to target potential customers through bidding for sponsored ads, reaching them on searches, as well as high-ranking sites relevant to the site.
• SEM (Search Engine Marketing) – encompasses nearly every end of internet marketing, more specifically as pertaining to a campaign utilizing search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN to reach a targeted audience.
• SEO (Search Engine Optimization) – process of optimizing on-site and off-site specifics in order to increase the relevance of the website to specific keywords and search terms, therefore increasing page rank and ultimately increasing online visibility in searches, essentially, making your site more popular.
• SMO (Social Media Optimization) – targeting non-search groups on social networking sites, such as Technorati, Digg, Squidoo and various blog sites. SMO targets those that may not necessarily search for your keywords because they already belong to an online community which shares information on those search terms.
• RM (Reputation Management) – various augmented forms of SEO and SMO which populate remaining ranking positions on searches for a site’s keyword set. While SEO and SMO may independently secure a top-ranking position, RM will help to populate the remaining positions in order to protect the site itself from high-ranking blogs or review sites slandering your good name.
• CI (Competitive Intelligence) – utilizing various resources and databases in order to compare your site to your competition. By pitting your site against other sites, we get a better idea of which branches of a given campaign are excelling and which need a boost.

These are just the basics. For more information about these services and others, please visit ReciprocalConsulting.com.