Search Engine Marketing - Click for Success
What is it?
Internet-based marketing that promotes a website by increasing its visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs) through the use of paid placement, contextual advertising and paid inclusion. “The practice of buying paid search listings”, often referred to as Pay-Per-Click (PPC), it is a separate discipline to SEO, and much broader in scope than pure SEO.
Why use it?
Do you want your website to grab the top ranking in the search engine result pages? Generate more site traffic? And, of course, increase sales as a result? SEM can help you attain this goal.
Google’s AdWords is the most popular and well known paid search platform but of increasing interest recently have been PPC offerings from social media sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook. Banner ads on other websites such as a news portal also offer significant potential - indeed a banner ad campaign we ran on a food industry portal achieved a Click-Thru-Ratio to our client’s site of 4-times the norm for that portal.
What’s a typical plan of action?
- One widely-used approach is to run PPC campaigns using Google AdWords, targeted on key market segments. The other major search engines also offer similar services as do social media sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook.
- The research and analysis phase of any SEM project is the most important element: campaigns that fail to deliver the expected results do so because of poor keyword selection and targeting of prospect segments.
- Keywords used by someone searching the internet are another critical SEM factor - the most common words or phrases may be too expensive for all but the biggest corporate organisations.
- However, it is often the case that the keyword terms that are most popular don’t provide the most clicks, and thus new sales leads. This is where the “Long Tail” principle comes in.
- Ads also need to be highly targeted: specific landing (or squeeze) pages are usually created on a website to capture a prospect’s interest (i.e. their name and email...).
- Banner ads can be used on industry-specific websites to drive further traffic to your website.
- Campaigns will be continually analysed and refined to improve the results.
