Google Adwords Marketing

SEM ~ Google's Ad-words is a must for your SEO/SEM skill set.

From the upcoming book "Web Marketing Myths and Snake Oil Salesmen"

The Search Engine Marketing (SEM)(in some circles known as Ad-words) industry has changed significantly over the last 5 years. Today, your web presence is incomplete without search engine marketing and I promise you…competition is fierce.

If you want to compete, SEM attributes such as search engine optimization, pay-per-click management also known as PPC, link popularity and Ad-words campaigns in Google are becoming the minimum standard components of any advertising campaigns and internet marketing strategies.

A professional and specialized search engine optimization strategist should provide a customized and well-targeted internet marketing plan, and provide services and consulting to implement them effectively. The SEM strategy should help you achieve maximum awareness about your website, products and services. It should deliver targeted traffic to your website. It should achieve higher level of sales through your website and create brand loyalty among your target audience, all while keeping the fixed expenses to a minimum.

A good example of one such strategist, web development and internet marketing solutions provider McCormick Web Marketing provides strategic internet marketing solutions for companies wishing to market their business online with the specific goals in line with increasing business. Over the years, McCormick Web Marketing has earned a reputation as a search engine marketing specialist, becoming a regional player in internet marketing strategy and internet marketing solutions for real estate, manufacturing, e-commerce, and health care industries.

What does an effective strategy look like?

An effective search engine optimization strategy should help you achieve top 10 ranking for your chosen and targeted key phrases in premier search engines such as Google, MSN and Yahoo. While this is able to be done with a fair amount of measurable success, it takes some time for organic results to be seen. This is the purpose of SEM, also known as PPC, or Pay-Per-Click.

A well-designed SEO process should involve other things besides outwardly mobilizing resources in the form of cash in order to get good traffic. Search Engine Management can play a pivotal role in the early success of your website. Good ads using keywords, pointed at optimized landing pages is the crux of what I would consider best practices.

How does Ad-words work for my organization?

Specifically, your ad-words strategy will be a little different with every industry, because the web is evolving at different rates, some entire industries have embraced the online experience at a slower rate which due to the ever evolving open sourced nature of things will slow down technologies and how each business will market itself.

Things that don’t change are fundamental to any campaign. This process starts with keyword research, essentially the same keywords you will use to build your organic optimization strategy with one exception, you can buy performance, and all you need is enough cash to compete with high traffic keywords. The theory today is that you should try to find niche in your keywords, which equals a balance between traffic, and keyword price, some lower priced keywords can still be effective and leave you with budget to add more of the same type of keywords. This niche effectiveness can be measured as KEI or Keyword effectiveness index, while it is used in organic seo keyword research it means something a little different in PPC and that is the supply is equal to the cash a word costs and organically it equals competing websites’ page rank.

Next comes optimizing your landing pages.

This is done by implementing the specific call to action that most likely ends up in a sale or contact, or whatever your particular conversion is. The call to action should be very easy to detect on the page and generally in a sidebar or footer, and also in the body content. To make the best landing pages you should understand your customer well enough to know what they really want from you and build that content accordingly. I think many people miss-understand sales and think they are taking something from the prospect, when in today’s web model you can only win by giving them the best “insert what they are looking for” they can find, and make it easy to get. This is a substantial block in creating landing pages that work, unless you understand and write down your goals for what you want your user to know, think, and do.

Finally, bidding strategy for Google Adwords

Well you can start out with a blanket price per click for all keywords, or you can manually edit each keyword. Generally how I have done this in the past is to start with a very large array of keywords and then getting rid of the ones above the threshold of profitability first, then getting rid of the keywords that over time don’t produce any traffic at any price, then I widdle away at the bids until I am either in the position I want, or I find that a lot of people are coming in on a certain search term and I then compete for that word until it hits the threshold of profitability.
And so that is a general discussion about Pay Per Click and how to get the most of your Google Adwords marketing budget.