Search Engine Marketing – 101

Search engine marketing is a huge medium of promotion which can directly yield targeted visitors. SEM (Search Engine Marketing) has grown dramatically through the last three years. Webmasters have reported that there is anywhere around a 60% to 800% increase in their traffic depending on their daily Pay Per Click budget.

Some of the most popular search engine marketing channels would be Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Microsoft adCenter. Though proper advertising can provide huge results, negative advertising can result in unwanted visitors and loss in budget.

The Right Keyword

The process of identifying the right keywords for your company is a crucial step in the success or failure of your search engine marketing. An SEO expert is essential who works with the product or company Subject Matter Expert. The SEO expert concludes the final set of keywords with the consent of the company expert.

Throughout the web we can find advertisements which claim something and when clicked you land in a page which has nothing to do with the advertisement campaign. These only lead to frustrated visitors who immediately leave the website. This increases the bounce rate of the website and never leads to conversion.

A unfamiliar keyword or a internal jargon can help you achieve top rankings but would never return a visitor. This is because, you would be the only person searching for the particular keyword. A keyword should be selected not by the basis of your search probability but by the amount of universal search.

Selecting a sincere SEO firm now becomes crucial under these circumstances. A bad SEO firm can just optimize your site for unpopular keywords, bring them to top 5 rankings and claim that they have done their job. In the end, you would not find any change in the visitor trend.

Avoid Misleading Keywords

Some keywords can be misleading the visitor. An advertisement “Fender Sales” can mean the guitar brand Fender or a vehicles fender. This can result in unwanted or untargeted visitors who do not result in conversion. Keep in mind that conversion should be the goal for any search engine marketing strategy. Visitors without conversion would result in loss of money in campaigns.

Keyword Competence

Many companies forget to analyze the keyword competition before choosing a keyword. A keyword like “Real Estate” has a competition of 587,000,000 in Google. It is hard to get to the top 10 rankings in these cases if your site is pretty new. A top 50 or 100 ranking also might involve some heavy SEO efforts.

However, the keyword “Real Estate Boston” yields just 886,000 results. It is intellectual to choose the keyword “Real Estate Boston” if you are a real estate broker in Boston.

Avoid Single Keywords

Single keywords should be selected only when necessary. If you are a farmer from Texas cultivating tomatoes, selecting the keyword ‘Farmer” would not be fruitful. This is because you are not farming all fruits and vegetables and you don’t export to all parts of the world. It is good to add your area or your cultivation. Good examples would be “vegetable farmer Texas” or “tomato cultivation Texas”

These steps can help you start of with a successful strategy resulting in better conversions which in turn leads to profit.