Search Engine Marketing for Small Businesses
Given the current economic environment & the pressure on small businesses to make the most of every dollar, it’s the perfect time to look at your marketing strategies, & consider search engine marketing as part of your overall approach.
Search Engine Marketing (or SEM) involves, through the use of selected words (or keywords), buying paid links on search engines such as Google & Yahoo, which searchers can click on to discover your site & business. You simply select a range of keywords that you want to advertise on, tell Google how much you’re willing to “bid” for each click (since you only pay when someone clicks on your ad), set your budget, & away you go!
Search Marketing also operates on an auction model – the more you’re willing to bid for a click, the higher your ad will appear in the search results.
The great advantages of search are that it’s relatively cheap (you determine how much you want to spend each day), it’s measurable, & it’s effective.
You can quickly set up your own search marketing campaign by going directly to Google & Yahoo, & have your ads up & running within a matter of minutes!
To get the most out of your search marketing campaigns, here are a few points to consider:
- What will your objective be? Are you trying to drive traffic to your site only? Are you trying to generate leads, increase call volumes?
- As an outcome of point 1, which keywords would consumers think of when looking for your site? Which keywords do you want people to find your site on? Which keywords do you not want to appear for?
- How much do you want to spend on a daily/monthly basis? You decide how much you spend in search, however the more you spend, the more clicks you will get.
- Who is your target market? Is it people in QLD only? NSW? Overseas? You can select where you want your ads to appear geographically in the search engines & target consumers this way.
- Is your website clear & easy to understand from a user’s perspective? There’s no point spending money on driving people to your site if it is complicated, slow to load, & they can’t find the information that they are looking for.
- Who are your competitors, & what are they doing in search marketing? You’ll be able to get some insights into what creative messaging they are doing, how competitive the group of keywords that you want to use are etc.
- How will you track conversions on your site? Google has a range of free tools to help with this – most useful is Google Analytics, which can measure all traffic to your site, where it is coming from, & what people are doing on your site when they get there.
Search Marketing is a rapidly growing industry, as the growth of Google will attest to. To help you get started, there are a number of books available online, which will give you a greater understanding of how search marketing works.
