Building an effective Search Engine Marketing Strategy

For those of you who don’t have a much fair idea of what Search Engine Marketing is, it’s just a larger segment of internet marketing comprising mainly of SEO & PPC.

Search Engine Marketing components include link-building techniques as well as a pay-per-click action plan.

How Does Search Engine Marketing Works?

To understand the working of SEM, you must first grasp the concept of search engines and how they work. Each search engine uses an albeit different but rather sets of complicated algorithms which make use of certain factors such as geolocation, your past searches and any other possibly available information to give the most relevant results.

Now, apart from the usual search results, these search engines also display paid i.e. sponsored ads mostly on top of those search results and in the empty space side of them, which rather basically puts them above the so-called natural or organic results.

To make use of both the organic results as well as these paid sponsored ads, a search engine marketing example comprises of paid ads as well as search engine optimization of the website.

How To Do Search Engine Marketing?

To do SEM there are a couple of search engine marketing steps that every marketer should follow:

1. 1- Decide upon the primary set of keywords and a secondary or LSI keywords set as well.
   2- Geographical location is of utmost importance whether to run targeted ads or to create backlinks.
   3- The Ad you create will have the ultimate effect on bringing visitors to your site.
   4- Bid on the ads in accordance with the expected ROI, not to exceed it and end up in heavy losses despite good traffic.
   5- Create relevant links as well as do outreach for those within your industry and in relation to it.

Lastly, but not the least, A/B testing your ads as well as link building strategy can help further optimize your efforts and get you to to make the most out it.

Search Engine Marketing Strategy

The steps that we mentioned above are but a brief overview of what a strategy comprises of. In this section, we are going to further evolve them along with what to do’s and whatnot.

Keyword & Competition Research

Instead of doing them separately, combining them can give better results. To get a better understanding, think who you decide as to be your competitors? Websites ranking in top 10 on your target keywords, right?

Further going into depth in them reveals their related targeted keywords as well as links they have built.

You can keep doing so i.e. finding more keywords via your competitors and then researching those new competitors, even more, to find related keywords until you are completely satisfied.

Paid Ads Analysis

Running pay per click ads on various search engines may seem like a highly beneficial idea with quick ROI, but in reality, it’s not so always.

High return promising keywords have higher bids and you may not always be able to secure a safe bid that will guarantee profits. A strategy could be to target relatively low priced keywords and use the traffic from them to rank on high competition keywords.

In the end, the budget you spend on paid ads should be worth the effort and combined with your seo, it should place your site higher than ever it was before.

SEO Optimization & Link Building

Apart from running ads, optimizing your website and its content for various search engine crawlers as well as building well-placed links highly relevant to your niche will give your site the required boost in SERP as well as visitor traffic.

Make sure that you are following the guidelines of major search engines like google, yahoo, Yandex etc whichever you are targeting and building links in accordance with them keeping in mind the latest update in their algorithm.

Technical factors such as canonical URLs, site loading time etc are also of utmost importance in eyes of google specially and are considered by other search engines as well. Don’t forget to take care of them.

When all the above is being said and done, you will need to monitor the SERP for any changes in your site location and the visitor’s traffic they bring. Depending upon whether the changes are positive or negative, you will need to do A/B testing to further optimize your efforts to get a better ROI.

Remember, for most paid efforts, changes began to show at least 48-72 hours after.