SEM for Small Business

SEM: Promoting Your Online Business

Of all the strategies you use to promote your business online, the most important by far is search engine marketing. SEM, or search engine marketing, is a term that encompasses both paying for a prominent position in designated areas of search engines and directories, as well as going through a process called search engine optimization to ensure that your site becomes visible through natural or “organic” means.

The process of paying for good positioning was once equated with SEM, but search engine marketing is a broader term now. Your small business SEM strategy can be limited to paying for placement, earning placement by optimizing your sites and having them recognized by the search engines or a combination of both. For maximum exposure, a hybrid SEM strategy combining paid and organic techniques will offer the best results.

PPC:  Paying for Your Position

Your “position” with directories and search engines is a measure of how close to the top of the list your site ends up when consumers use search terms to locate information. The goal, of course, is for your domain name to be at the top of the list. After all, the highest rankings command the largest percentage of clicks.

Since a high position on search results is valuable real estate, it’s a great moneymaker for search engines. Big names like eBay, Overstock.com and Home Depot often pop up at the top on searches for household goods, for example. With large marketing budgets, these sites often monopolize the top organic results.

For this reason, search engines have designated specific areas at the top, right, and occasionally the bottom of search results for paid positions, clearly designated as paid text ads. Sites just starting out online, small businesses, and those looking to improve their online search engine marketing efforts often purchase these coveted positions to stay competitive.

Prices can be high for these valuable spots. One way that vendors price your position is called PPC or “pay-per-click” (or CPC, “cost-per-click”). More popular, highly searched keywords command a higher price tag. Other forms of paid SEM ads can be in the form of cost-per-impression, which charges for each thousand appearances of your ad on a website within the “content network”, composed of sites that earn revenue by hosting PPC ads.

Clearly, a click on a link to your site (called a “click-through”) doesn’t guarantee a sale, but driving this site traffic is a start in getting potential customers to notice you. So it might cost only $100 to send 10,000 visitors to your site, but what really counts is the “conversion rate,” the percentage of click-throughs that turns into actual purchases. If you experience a conversion rate of 4%, 400 of those 10,000 visitors will convert to sales. This translates to a cost of $.25 per sale. A lower conversion rate would increase the cost per sale.

SEO: Search Engine Optimization

In many cases, the ultimate goal of online search engine marketing efforts is to rank high organically. With each query, search engines return 10 organic search results per page and several PPC ads. Usability studies have shown that a majority of search engine users skip over PPC ad sections and jump right to the organic listings. After all, organic placement often reflects the quality of a site, as it requires natural optimization. What this means for SEM professionals and companies is that organic search engine marketing, or search engine optimization, is key to success online.

Search engine optimization, however, is both complex and mysterious.

It’s complex because it involves research, the possible re-engineering of your web site, considerable knowledge and experience and the ability to keep up to date with algorithmic changes by  major search engines. It’s mysterious precisely because nobody knows exactly what each algorithm takes into account in its formula for ranking websites and displaying search results. Many online business owners are frustrated because they can’t seem to obtain a clear set of rules for optimizing their web sites. The search engines have a good reason for keeping their rules a secret.

The goal of search engines is to index every web pages and deliver relevant content to searchers.  After all, search engines are aimed at the needs of the end user, not for the ease of the marketing professionals. They want to return results that are both relevant to the user and of high quality. To ensure these relevant organic search results are achieved and to counteract any manipulative “spam” tactics, search engines tweak their algorithms regularly. If these algorithms were publicized, every site on the web would be perfectly optimized, thus eliminating the usefulness of search results.  What this means for marketers is that incorporating organic search engine marketing “white hat” techniques and staying on top of the latest trends is essential.

Keyword Selection and Optimization

Keywords are simply the words (or phrases) that users type into the search box to get search engine results. Obviously, you’d like your site to pop up high in the list when someone types in a phrase that describes your business or one of your products. Alas, the competition is fierce.

Your search engine optimization strategy should be to have each page on your site optimized for a particular keyword or phrase that best describes the product or service offered on that page .

The relative frequency of a key phrase on a page can be easily determined by spiders (the search engine’s search robot), so it’s often used among the search engine rules for ranking your site. Search engines also look at keywords used in a site’s domain name and the code of each page, considering title tags, meta tags, alt tags, heading tags, and other coding features that allow keyword placement.    There is no magic formula to determine the optimum frequency for including keywords on a page, but it is important to know that this is a consideration.

The most effective key phrases are those that are naturally used by consumers as they’re searching the internet. There are many tools to figure out what level of interest there is in your product or service and what words people use to search for it online.  The Google AdWords tool is a good place to start to see the approximate level of searches performed on a term each month, as well as the level of competition you might face from other advertisers.

Working with Expert SEO Consultants

Search engine optimization consultants have the training, tools and experience needed to do provide your site with high organic search results. The biggest headache in SEO isn’t rewriting text to smoothly incorporate phrases and coming up with descriptions that include the keywords. It’s keeping up-to-date on what algorithms the search engines are using to measure the relevance and quality of your site.

Search engine optimization consultants do a lot of reading, they attend conferences and they participate in online forums. They do whatever they can to stay on top of the latest search engine marketing trends and SEM algorithm shifts. For a beginner in e-commerce, the SEO professional is an important member of your marketing team.

KPIs Track Success of Online Search Engine Marketing

One of the most important things you can do to advance your SEM strategy is to figure out what key performance indicators (KPIs) are most important to you and monitor them frequently.  These KPIs most often include # of site visits, # of visits from organic keyword traffic, # of visits from paid keyword traffic, individual keyword “performance”, and many, many more.

KPIs can be as simple as tracking the rise in your site’s ranking for targeted keywords, or as complex as the conversion rate of visitors from a particular country, accessible through Google Analytics – an excellent, free tool that can be easily implemented on your siteSelection of the best KPIs to consider depends entirely on your goals. For example, if your site is looking to sell products internationally, geographic performance indicators will go a long way in tracking the success of your global SEO campaigns.

Conclusion

Ultimately, both paid and organic search engine marketing efforts can provide a substantial amount of growth for businesses online. As you can see, there are many factors that search engines consider in displaying sites in search results. Make sure that your site follows SEO/PPC best practices by using an SEM consultant or by accessing online resources, including Google, SEO Book, SEOMoz, blogs like Search Engine Land – and countless others – and keeping a close eye on your KPIs. An audience of active searchers is out there, ready to find what you are selling.