Keys to Search Engine Marketing Success
Search Engine Advertising
Search engine advertising is an increasingly effective way to attract qualified prospects. To advertise on a search engine, you purchase keywords that relate to your company or your products or services. You choose the price you want to pay (per click or per impression) and that price determines in what order your link appears in the search results. The more you pay, and the higher click through rate your ads receive determines how high your listing will appear. Often, the top three paid listings are shared with other search engines. So if you’re willing to pay for prominent billing, you want to make sure you’re always in the top three listings. This is a very effective way to maximize your exposure across multiple search engines. The most popular search engines that offer sponsored listings are Google & Overture, which syndicate their ads in other popular directories.
To receive maximum exposure during certain searches, “sponsored links” can be purchased on most search engine sites. Sponsored links appear separately from the search results and are typically above or next to the search results. These ads are often sold at a premium because they have more prominence on the page. Since most of these are sold to the highest bidder, sponsored links can become pricey. To ensure a proper return on investment in sponsored links, establish limits on what you will pay and monitor prices daily. If done properly, it can be very profitable. But if not done properly, it can be an expensive lesson learned in online marketing.
Keys to Search Engine Marketing Success
Begin with the end in mind |
| Search engine marketing should be an early consideration, not an afterthought . To be truly effective, it must be introduced during the design and development stage of your online initiative. |
Optimize Web site for search engines |
| Choose strategic keywords, phrases and content (both visible and invisible text) and minimize extensive graphics, tables and other code that will inhibit the spider. Some have found success by creating and registering new pages that are void of all extraneous code, images, tables, etc., keeping only the most important text. |
Designate a landing page |
| In an integrated campaign, your print, online, and electronic media should provide links to unique landing pages, making it easy to track effectiveness of each campaign. Landing pages should relate to the context of the ads and make it easy for visitors to take action (e.g. request more info, submit their information, etc.). Here are a few other tips: • Remove all distractions from the landing page that would prevent the visitor from taking the action you are seeking. |
Do your homework |
| Identify the most appropriate search engines to use based on targeted audience, industry focus, cost to register, cost to advertise and amount of traffic. |
Measure and compare results
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| Track results (impressions, click-through, responses, conversion rates, etc.) and compare results across different search engines. When comparing, isolate the differences between each campaign or search engine. Make sure you compare apples to apples. This can be difficult, so try to be scientific about it.Seek outside help Most rely on their Web developers to register and manage search engine marketing. In most cases, they underestimate the time and attention required to become (and stay) knowledgeable on search engine marketing techniques, tactics and advertising costs. |
Search engine marketing specialists can often generate substantial incremental value above and beyond what you can do on your own. As with most business functions, if someone else can do it better, faster and cheaper, it probably makes sense to outsource.