As the industry starts to slow down over the holiday period, it is important to remember that the online world never stops; people keep searching, enquiring, and buying regardless of the festivities.
The credit crunch doesn’t slap on a party hat and get all merry over the holiday period either, so our present to you is a brief guide to search engine marketing in the credit crunch era.
One of the most important advantages of Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is the fact that it is utterly accountable. There are clear and well-established measurement systems in place that have been proven to work. You can use websites like SocialGreg to help increase your social media presence, which will ultimately lead to better search engine marketing. Read on to find out some workable SEM techniques.
1. Search Landing Pages
Create landing pages that illustrate your strengths and have very strong and clear calls to action. These pages must be easy to navigate and straight to the point. Match copy within the landing pages to that in your paid search advertisements. Landing pages are ideal for special campaigns and allow you to directly track their success. We suggest creating and implementing landing pages, and the results would speak for themselves. They can be quickly created and built into your existing site. We also recommend microsites that allow you to engage the customer further and are just as trackable as landing pages.
2. Making the Most of Your Budget
It is sensible (in most cases!) to re-allocate the budget from other media to pay per click (PPC). SEM can be quickly altered to integrate with the rest of your marketing activities. Move budget to specific campaigns, i.e., a run of print ads that are attracting traffic via search. Perfect Storm is an expert at allocating and managing online budgets and ensuring SEM works in tandem with your marketing mix.
3. Spend on the Right Words
Quality is key when it comes to keywords. Every business has words that have the highest conversion rates, so focus on these and create a solid list. Remember that your paid ads must be relevant to your content. We suggest that you carry out extremely in-depth keyword research to ensure the compilation of a relevant and effective keyword strategy.
4. Know Your Targets
Use research tools and real-time demographic profiles to understand your target market. Create tailored ad copy with your research results in mind. Taking these steps can achieve higher rankings when your audience is searching, which in turn leads to hits and hopefully the all-important conversion.
5. Test It!
The features are in place to allow you to test as many ads as you want, so make sure you take advantage of this! Test that copy until you cannot test it anymore! This way, you can make sure that your copy grabs the attention of your customers.
6. Track It!
You can track and account for your web activity with simple analytics that will produce clear and useful reports. Accurate monitoring allows you to keep track of costs and ROI. Web analytics allows you to see what is working best and where and when it is working.
7. Educate!
Your staff needs to know how to interpret the analysis data. They have to remember that high traffic levels are not a key metric and that conversion and click-through rates are king. High traffic and low conversion rates equate to poor quality traffic. Having a decent level of understanding within your staff is very important.
8. Outsource
All bias aside, it can be a time-consuming process managing your online campaigns in-house and can allude to a false economy. In this nasty financial climate, it is quite likely that you are cutting resources, and this can lead to your SEM receiving less attention and a rapidly dropping return on investment.
Perfect Storm can create, implement and manage your digital marketing strategies. They are specialists in SEO, PPC, the creation of online ads/landing page/microsites, online branding, and social media marketing.
Article Submitted By Community Writer
