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Successful
Search Engine Marketing: Four 'Must Dos'
By Manoj Aravindakshan
A few months ago, I attended a seminar on search
engine marketing organized by Hitwise, the competitive intelligence
provider. The event, held in our home base of Singapore where paid
search marketing still has a long way to go, was an attempt at
creating greater awareness of the potential of this channel in a
lukewarm market. Apart from a speaker from Hitwise, the select panel
also included representatives from Yahoo, MSN (representing the search
engine side) and eBay & B2B media company, Global Sources
(representing successful search engine marketers).
Towards the end of the seminar, the panelists
were asked to name the one advice they would give to individuals or
companies considering search engine marketing. Their responses
summarized the key things that any search engine marketer--even
someone who is considerably experienced--would do well to remember.
Experiment: Contrary to what some people
might lead you to believe, one will be hard-pressed to find a single,
permanent path to paid search marketing success. Like any other
science, one needs to continue to experiment--- be it with the
keywords being targeted, or the bids and campaign budgets, the ad
creative or the landing page where users are led to from the ad. One
of the biggest advantages of most pay-per-click (PPC) search engine
marketing campaigns is that it is conducive to lots of
experimentation, so make the most of it.
Start small: PPC search marketing, while
one of the most cost-effective marketing channels, can still drain the
advertising dollars very quickly, if one doesn't watch campaigns
closely. Small to medium-sized businesses, in particular, will be best
served by starting with smaller budgets, experimenting and
progressively increasing their spend after they achieve a certain
minimum threshold in cost-effectiveness that works for them.
Get the message in context: Your messages
have to be absolutely in context to what the user is looking for.
Context and relevance (see next point) and may sometimes be a bit
confusing and interchangeable, but that is because these are
essentially two of the most critical pillars of search engine
marketing.
Relevance of the ad results can be viewed as a
match with the fundamental motivation that drives a user to take the
action that he/she eventually takes, while context is about the
influential environment that can sway a user another way--- it is like
identifying the right bait, or the underlying or even dormant
motivation of the user If you can get context and relevance to be
congruent, such that the user gets exactly what he wants when he wants
it, you have maximized your chance of getting the highest quality
click, and possibly the best return on the dollar that you just paid
the search engine. On to relevance....
Keep your ad and site content relevant:
This almost goes without saying, but it is often overlooked. The
success of a PPC campaign depends on the relevance of the keywords
selected, the relevance of the advertising message (remember that an
ad is competing against the perception of relevance of the organic
search results as well as against other sponsored/ paid ads), and last
but certainly not the least, the relevance of the content on the page
that the user lands after clicking on the ad message. Constantly
evaluate all of the above for relevance, and work on making those as
relevant as you can to what the user is looking for.
About the Author
Manoj Aravindakshan is Director of On
Target Media & Marketing Services, a Singapore-based marketing
services company, offering paid search engine marketing (PPC) and search
engine optimization(SEO) services, in addition to a range of other
online marketing and web content services.
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