What Is Search Engine Marketing?
Search Engine Marketing is a term that is used to mean Pay Per Click Advertising in the search engines, where you can pay for your advertisements to appear at the top of the Search Results page or along the right or left hand sides of the organic search results.
The focus of search engine marketing is to gain a return on investment (ROI) for each dollar spent, which will in turn increase market share and your sales base. Any investment in online marketing campaigns can secure your brand awareness, increase your subscriber base, make online sales and deliver targeted laser-like customers to your virtual doorstep.
Businesses are turning to Search Engine Marketing for a number of reasons: the first is the recognition of faster profit potential; the second is that hefty priced Yellow Pages Advertising is considered “old school” – and the return on investment is quite low compared to online advertising strategies.
The key benefit of using paid search campaigns (or pay per click campaigns) is that you don’t need to wait days, weeks or months to test your website out. When you first have your website upgraded, redesigned or built from scratch you can test the performance of your site quite easily by sending search engine traffic directly to the pages that you have created.
This provides the benefit of testing the “conversion rate” of your site, which can provide key insights into your business. Take for example the mortgage broker business, who has recently redesigned an old site to bring it into the 21st Century. If the old site was not being found in the Search Engines using organic search optimisation methods, then how will the new site perform if there is no traffic coming to it ?
The answer lies in your ability to pay your favorite search engine provider to send traffic to your website based on certain keywords that you want to bid on.
Setting Up a Search Engine Marketing Campaign
Search Engine Marketing consists of three parts:
- The Advertisement
- The Keywords
- The Landing Page
Each of these three parts of your search engine marketing campaign contribute to the overall success, or otherwise, of your advertising. If you get one part wrong, then you’re going to lose money … and fast!
So search engine marketing isn’t for the faint hearted; if you’re going to get into it then you will need to keep your wits about you. Cost-wise, you will need to set aside at least $20 per day towards your campaign. This will enable you to research the keywords that will bring profitable traffic to your website. When you are certain that the campaign is working as intended, then you may want to consider increasing your daily or monthly spend – but only after you are convinced that your return on investment is in line with your normal business practice.
Tips To Setting Up A Good PPC Campaign
i) The Advertisement
Your advertisement is broken down into three sections: a Title, the call to action content, and a referring URL. Essentially you will need to ensure that the keyword you are bidding on is included in the Title of your campaign, as well as elsewhere in your call to action.
The text in your call to action can vary in a multitude of ways, depending on your industry, genre, style, etc. The primary affect you want to achieve with your advertisement is to grab your web searcher’s attention, and bring them to your site. Once on your site, it’s your opportunity to sell them your services.
ii) The Keywords
Keywords are the primary backbone of your campaign, and if you get these wrong then you will start to lose a lot of money in expense clicks or clicks from sources where you do not intend people to come from.
For instance, just suppose you are a mortgage broker and your main service area is Brisbane. What you need to do is to include terms that target the Brisbane area, and exclude terms for outside this area. For instance, if your initial keyword list included “mortgage broker Cairns” then you would be bidding on a (very expensive) keyword and would not be able to service the customer. It’s better to set up targeted keywords lists like “mortgage broker Brisbane” or “mortgage broker Toowong” to really narrow down the location where you want to serve your advertisements.
You may also want to use “negative keywords” in your campaigns. In fact, you’d be crazy not to include them, as they are the keywords that will save you money by not allowing your advertisements to be shown to people who are casually surfing for unassociated information. For instance, if you set up your initial campaign as “mortgage broker” and the results showed that people were clicking on “mortgage broker Cairns” and you were in Brisbane, then you might want to include a negative keyword “Cairns” in your list of search phrases.
iii) The Landing Page
The final component in every online advertising strategy is to ensure that your landing page is well presented. By the time someone has clicked on your advertisement and arrived at your site, they are fully expecting to find the information you are presenting easily.
One thing that Google dominates in is the use of relevant content. So for each piece of the advertising strategy you will need to ensure that your keyword lines up in your advertising, as well as your landing page. If there’s any serious mismatch in the way this is set up then Google will penalize you by increasing the cost per click of the traffic that you are wanting to send to your site. They call this “quality score”, and it’s sent many business owners broke (or schizophrenic) in the process. The better quality score that you possess, the more traffic you will receive, and the lower price you will pay for your traffic.
And that’s how to set up your Search Engine Marketing Campaign.
There are of course other control measures that you can put in place for your Search Engine Marketing campaigns, such as narrowing down the scope of your geographic target, identifying your target audience, and using negative keywords to remove unwanted search results.
The Dangers of Search Engine Marketing
As mentioned briefly above, if you get your search engine marketing campaign wrong, then it could be related to many factors. Only an experienced optimisation engineer will be able to debug the causes of where you are losing money in your online advertising.
One of largest dangers for any small business owner in running your own online advertising campaigns is the lack of time that you can devote to monitoring and adjusting the campaign to make it profitable and effective. All Search Engine Marketing campaigns require close attention for the first one to two weeks while it is adjusted (or your website is adjusted) to improve the conversion rate.
If you fail to adjust your campaign in the first 24 – 48 hours then your expenses can be extremely high – or there are penalties that can be introduced against you for running untargeted advertising campaigns. Neither of there results will provide you with what you want: increased sales for your business.
Using the information on this page you have got all it takes to start your own profitable search engine marketing campaign. However don’t be afraid to pick up the phone and talk with one of our consultants about setting up your campaign properly. We can save you hundreds – if not thousands – of dollars in the process of setting up online advertising campaigns that will meet your budget and ensure that your advertising dollars produce a solid return on investment.
After all, that’s what we’re here for.
Call a search engine marketing consultant today.
