Friday, April 19, 2013

SEO that Drives Business!

By Walker Levi Percy


Competition in search engine optimization and in traditional forms of marketing has one special thing in common. You are jockeying to occupy the most valuable real estate, in this case, in the online environment. What is that space worth? That is determined by your market, the volume of monthly traffic that your keywords drive, and by the part of the buying cycle where your keywords sit.

Old Fashioned Marketing versus SEM

For someone who has very little knowledge of search engine marketing, they may not be aware of the ROI, the ability to measure each and every interaction with a potential customer, and the lower customer acquisition costs involved. Furthermore, they may not have a true grasp of the significant difference between a potential customer in the traditional marketing space versus one in the search engine marketing space.

Traditional marketing has become, to coin a popular phrase, interruption marketing. After a busy day at work, you sit back and relax while watching your tv show that you've been looking forward to all day. Then, in the middle of a great scene, there is a break for a commercial. You didn't actively turn to this commercial. In fact, in most cases, you are focused on the return of your program of choice. You might be amused by the commercial, but you could easily be annoyed. Traditional marketing is like throwing out a big net into the ocean. You may catch a lot of fish, but you might not catch any. And you only have 30 seconds to do it in the case of tv ad buys. So their ultimate hope is that you'll select them when you are actually in a position of desire and opportunity to buy.

When someone logs onto their computer and goes to google and enters a search term on your product or service, they are a very different potential customer when you compare them to the person who was watching tv. They are either in the research stage, or they are in the final stages of making their purchase decision and may even have their credit in hand at their computer or smartphone. Clearly, they are a highly motivated prospect that you can motivate to move to a purchase when they are at your site. The ability to track your prospect on your site is unprecedented in traditional marketing terms. You can find out where they came from, how far they scrolled down on your pages, what links clicked on etc..

Knowing What Words Drive Traffic and Business

The proper keyword research is the foundation of any search marketing campaign. If you don't start with the right keywords, you could end up doing a mountain of work and not really achieving anything meaningful. You may be showing up number one for "manhattan realtor who likes to surf" but if this search term is, for all practical purposes, never actually searched, then it is meaningless for your business. Proper keyword research takes time and is absolutely enhanced when there is a wealth of experiential knowledge on what it takes to rank in a specific category and the time required for that to happen. It's not easy but having a long term view of your SEM goals is a vital component of your search engine marketing success.

Where to focus your keywords? If you go for the most competitive words at the outset, you are likely not going to see results for a longer amount of time than less competitive words.

If you do decide to tackle the big tough keywords at the beginning, make sure that you have some less competitive words in your basket so you can get a sense of what is working and what is not working much faster. That is the risk you take when you have not managed hundreds of campaigns or seen movement, both positive and negative, on thousands of keywords. Gaining the proper perspective to evaluate what is working and what needs changing can be costly if you have not run a large volume search marketing campaigns in the past.

And this is one the key factors in securing a reputable company that manages seo campaigns.




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