Thursday, May 3, 2007

Tips for Search Engine Marketing

Why search engine marketing?

Over 90% of all web users perform searches daily on the major search engines. As a result, the most effective way to obtain online success is to ensure your company is visible on these search engines, wherever and whenever someone searches. What’s more, unlike other forms of advertising, web searchers are “actively” looking for something, making search engine marketing one of the most compelling marketing channels available - anywhere.

Search engine marketing defined


Search engine marketing encompasses both natural search engine optimization (SEO) and paid search engine sponsorships (PPC). SEO is the process of obtaining and sustaining high rankings on the search engines for keyword phrases that are most relevant to your business. PPC allows you to place a sponsored link on the major search engines for a multitude of potential keyword terms and phrases your customers most likely will use. There is simply no faster way to drive traffic to your site than this.

While natural SEO is preferred by searchers, ranking are never guaranteed and take several months, if ever, to rank. PPC, on the other hand, is immediate and can deliver large amounts of traffic to your site quickly. Regardless of how you feel about “paying” for your traffic, the truth is that your company needs to be visible when your potential customers search. Therefore, we always suggest a marketing mix that includes both SEO and PPC.


Our top five tips.

Below is a list of the top five legitimate things you can do today for improved search engine marketing results tomorrow:

1) Do SEO & PPC – Make sure your company is visible whenever your potential customers search. Will they respond better to your natural listing or to your paid ad? The only way to know for sure is to be in both places.
2) Do Keyword Research – Keywords will make or break your campaigns. So make sure you choose words carefully. Stay away from general words (car) and instead use more descriptive words (red sports car) and/or words that customers farther along in the buying cycle would be using (red Audi 500 sports car 2007).
3) Test, Test, Test – Keep testing your creative until you find the right message.
4) Measure, Measure, Measure – All of the search engines offer free conversion tools. Most companies do not take advantage of them.
5) Tweak, Tweak, Tweak – Wonder why some people get better marketing results than others? It's because they adjust/fine tune. Use your conversion data to help better guide your decisions.

A final thought.

With so many different search engines, and ways to get listed, how does one go about selecting the best one? While you could literally spend months trying to get your site listed on all of the thousand search engines, the truth is that the top three search engines account for over 90% of the market. Therefore, we suggest you employ most of your time on Google (65%), Yahoo! (19%), MSN (9%).

Ron Weber is President of SD Interactive, a San Diego Interactive Agency.