Search Marketing

Using the internet for purposes of search marketing probably forms the base of your advertising plan in this day and age; especially since it outstrips every older form (television commercials, billboard advertisements, telemarketing cold calls), given the massive migration of consumers to cyber space. It’s greatest potential lies in the simple fact that more and more new people will be searching for the same keywords for which you have successfully optimized your business website, and so will be added to a growing customer base; the percentage that actually sticks depends on two search marketing factors: the quality of your content, and the degree of your sites optimization.

Optimizing Your Business Site for Search Marketing

Search engine optimization (SEO) is starting to be a word as common as any other in the English language; it has gained great popularity over the past few years as people realize the great utility of taking their wares online.

However, as in any endeavor with hordes of people rushing in; only a small percentage eventually succeeds. This is because search marketing actually involves a rather large suite of skills to implement successfully; you need to have - or quickly learn while on the job – strong writing skills, knowledge of keywords, backlinks, content marketing, social media marketing, good programming skills for HTML primarily (although others can come into play, depending on the scope of your website, such as PHP, Ajax, MySql, and other strange-sounding tech-stuff). You need to know how to use article marketing, guest blogging, and other link-building tactics in order to be noticed by the search engine robots, which will then push your site’s ranking up through the endless pages of search, where greater and greater numbers of potential consumers are landing, after typing in your keywords.

The Long-Tail vs. the Short-Tail

It is important to understand the difference between keywords and long-tail keywords; because choosing competitive ones can ultimately result in a poor investment of your time, as well as a lot more money spent in search marketing than would have otherwise been the case.

Short tail keywords are essentially just single word phrases, such as “dog”. If you are a company selling dog-sitting services, for example, you don’t want to spend money bothering with the optimization of such an incredibly broad term as “dog”; because not only is the competition probably fairly stiff, but most people who are typing dog into Google or Bing or Yahoo search aren’t looking for dog sitting services. A successful program of optimization will result in a lot of traffic, but very few conversions; which means a lot of wasted money on your end – especially if you employed a pay-per-click program like Google Adwords or Microsoft AdCenter.

Long tail, on the other hand, is where the search marketing money is located. This is the technique where you are optimizing your site with keywords that a substantial number of people are typing in verbatim into the search engines. “Dog treats for diabetic Alaskan Huskies” is a very long tail keyword; which, while it will have far fewer total numbers of searches than merely “dog”, will have an extremely high conversion rate if you can corral all the traffic. Furthermore, the competition is likely very low, which means it will require very little effort in the promotional realm for your campaign.

The Importance of On Page Optimization

While the importance of search marketing cannot be understated, because of the effect it can have on bringing a steady stream of traffic to your website, any marketing plan must also consider its on page optimization to be just as important, because this is what will retain the visitors you get on your landing page(s). First of all, the layout of your website should be visually appealing without being busy; there should be nothing that inhibits site navigation. Make sure your internal linking scheme is understandable, and each clickable anchor text leads to the appropriate, informational page. A proper site organization will keep visitors onsite, which naturally increases the chances they investigate your service or product enough to click through.

Every few months or so, the major search engines make changes to their search algorithms, which places greater emphasis on some aspect of search marketing that was previously minimized. Currently; the onsite optimization method of content marketing is growing in importance. Make sure your pages are well-written; and write plenty of them on various aspects of your business, because search engines are rewarding websites with a lot of content. This also serves to build a more trusting customer base for you, if you take the opportunity to enable vigorous interaction with the comments on various pages. As you can see, for someone with the required skills to be a good search engine optimizer, the potential for success is quite attractive.