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To attract customers on the net, they have to find you. When it comes to marketing your business online, search engines can be your friend or foe. After all, how do you find the information about products and services you are looking for? To succeed online, you have to succeed with sites like Google, MSN and Yahoo!. Unfortunately, how search results for specific key words are chosen and ranked remains a highly guarded secret. There proven steps you can take to help improve your placement though. Better placement means more leads so read on... Marketing to search engines is important for every web site but even more critical for e-commerce businesses where a click to the right product may convert to a quick sale. For non e-commerce businesses, you have to determine how important your web site is to your prospecting efforts and balance that with your offline efforts. In either case, marketing on search engines is affordable and easy enough to be included in every marketing plan. Terminology SEO - Search Engine Optimization is the process of creating your web site so that it ranks high in search engine results for specific key words. It requires technical know-how and is an ever-evovling field. It is better to leave this to professional web developers and SEO experts. SEM - Search Engine Marketing is less techincal than SEO and can often be handled in-house. SEM includes pay-per-click advertising that show up in search engine results. All of the major search engines offer their own branded version. Your ad appears next to or above unpaid results. By purchasing advertising from search engines, you can reach potential customers when they are actively looking for information on your prouduct or service. The best part is that you only pay if the user clicks on your ad. Done incorrectly, you will attract lots of visitors that don't buy. When that happens, you are paying for clicks and traffic without return on your investment. Your ad and your site need to be optimized to close the deal. What do you need to do? Set your budget! You will need some method of trackign your results and monitoring the success (or failure) of your campaign. Some key points to keep in mind: Being at the top isn't always better. For popular search terms, paying for the top position may not pay off. You need to find a balance between cost and conversion that fits your budget. If you are selling high ticket items, paying a few dollars for every lead may be worth it. If your margin is small, you need to aim towards a high conversion and that often comes from clicks generated on the second or third page of the results. Don't forget who you are marketing to! Forget about your own personal preferences when it comes to search terms. You need to find out what your prospective customers type in that search box. Try out a few terms and see where your competitors show up. Limit Yourself! Be careful not to choose key words that are too general. Specificity is more effective. For example, "pets" may be too general; "exotic birds" is more effectively targeted to your potentional customer. Most SEM providers allow you to use negative key words - words that, when used in the search box, don't apply to your product. For example, if you sell snow skis, you may want to use "water" as a negative word. When a user types the words "water ski" in the search box, your ad will not be shown. They are obviously looking for a different product. Back to the Drawing Board! Vary your key word choices, ad language and your placement to see what works best for you. As a rule of thumb, what works today may be completely useless tomorrow so keep your eye out for changes in performance. If your ad is losing effectiveness, it's time to revise. Climb to the Top of the Bottom! The competition is high on the leading search engines but there are alternatives that might work better for you. Specialty search engines cater to specific industries, geography, interest or other demographic. These options may be less expensive and offer more of an impact. |