How to Use Search Engine Marketing
You’ve spent countless hours creating a website for your business. It has a professional, eye-catching design. It contains useful, rich content, and convincing copy about your products and services. So why is your visitor count so low? The majority of online traffic originates from search engines. Create a search engine marketing plan, and your page hits will increase.
The Basics
There are two ways search engines can generate traffic for your website. The first is through paid advertisements, when search engines will place your ad at the top of search results and you will pay for each click your website gets or impression that your ad receives on the search platform of your choice. This is what most refer to as “search engine marketing.” However we will also be discussing organic efforts in this post as well. You can also receive free, organic traffic from search engines when your website ranks high on the results listing.
Paid Search Engine Advertising
Paid search engine advertisements work on a cost per click (CPC) payment plan. When creating your advertisements, you will select the keywords you want to target, the price you will pay for each click, and the amount you are willing to pay each day. CPC advertising works as an auction, and you are bidding on keywords. The higher you pay for the clicks, the better visibility your ads will see in some (but not all) cases.
The best method is to identify keywords that your customers are using to find you and focus on the less expensive terms. While you will have no choice but to place higher bids on popular keywords, you can make your campaign more cost effective with some research and attention to your account as time passes.
Google, Yahoo, Bing and even Facebook offer variant forms of this advertising structure. In some cases you can choose to pay for every 1,000 impressions. This speaks more to branding than sales, but is another method of promoting a brand, product or idea. Both angles can be very effective means of advertising.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Optimize your website for search, and you will receive daily free traffic. In order to get a substantial page view increase, you must earn a high page rank for your content. This can be a gradual process requiring hard work and patience. Your page rank will depend on several factors, including the use of quality keywords within your content, and your number of backlinks. You will also need appropriate tags, fresh content, reasonable load time and a host of other factors that work together to increase your ranking.
Keywords
Whether you are working on CPC advertising, or SEO, choosing the most effective keywords is vital. You will want to choose relevant phrases to your website that are being regularly searched for on search engines. You can use the Google keyword tool to discover keywords with the most monthly searches. Another concern will be competition. CPC advertisers will want keywords that not many other advertisers are targeting. Those working with SEO will ideally choose keywords that create only 20,000 results on Google or less. Finding a balance between popular search terms and noncompetitive keywords is the recipe for success in search engine marketing. The popular terms drive traffic, but the less competitive keywords that describe your business help to differentiate your website.
Using the internet as an advertising platform is but one of the marketing avenues available to us. The benefit of an organization such as AMA Tampa Bay is that you get the opportunity to meet and pick the brains of professionals involved in every aspect of research, advertising and promotions.
Sources:
What is SEM? (Search Engine Land)
A Guide for Webmasters ad Search Engine Marketers (Search Engine Watch)
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