SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING: The online advertising that can help boost your business in minutes

One of the major aspects of internet marketing is search engine marketing(SEM). This is when your ads compete for a placement based on relevant keywords or phrases. “When users search with a specific keyword or phrase, search engines displace some ads on top, at the bottom or by the right side, those are paid advert, they are also known as pay per click because you are only charged when the ads are clicked on. The ones in the middle are the organic search result. You don’t need to pay to be there. We will cover organic search results in later posts.”

It’s actually a bid for keywords. Search engines will try to see which advert actually matches what a particular user is searching for using different parameters. A lot are embedded in it and most times you need an expert to handle it for you.

Let us go through the simple steps to have effective paid online promotion


1) Have a plan, without a plan the campaign might fail: Your plan must spell out what you want to achieve.

*How do I Identify the target audience?
*What are the likely needs of my audience in relationship with your product?
*Understand your competitors(What can make my ads stand out?)
*How do you motivate them, do I want to create awareness, is it a promo?
*What are the tools available to measure and analyze the metrics?
*How do my company’s policies fit into the planned campaign?
*These are some of the questions you might want to ask yourself.

2) Keyword research: Once you have decided on the kind of advert you want to do. You have to do keyword research to know what keywords your prospective audience would/likely use that could display your advert and result in clicks that will land you conversions, which is one of the utmost goals of every digital marketing activities.

Let’s say I sell shoes in Lagos Nigeria. I should be able to see keywords or phrase like “Buy new shoes in Lagos” or New Italian shoes in Lagos” etc. This might not really be what people are using exactly to find shoe sellers in Lagos

That is why you need to take advantage of keyword research tools like Google Keyword Planner, MOZ, Answerthepublic, SEMrush, HubSpot etc and see keyword behavior before using it. Choose relevant keywords that can bring in traffic, put yourself in the shoes of the buyers/your target audience, list out keywords, phrases to use.

So when people search for something similar to your advert, it shows up based on indices relative to Google’s search algorithm depending on which search engine is used for the search purposes.

But this does not happen automatically. You need to study and know what keywords people are using similar to what you are selling. Its advisable not to jump into ads until you have done and perfect your homework.

If you fail on this aspect, you’ll be leaving chunks of money on the table.

3) Website optimization: If you are a starter, I always advise to start with a website or a social media account. We do a thorough SEO or social media marketing for you, firstly by analyzing the data collected over time with our tools and use same to start Search engine marketing.

If you already have a website, you have to clean your house because you will have huge traffic landing on your page transacting business with you. here is a checklist:
Your landing pages: you need to optimize your landing pages for speed to avoid bounce rates
Contact address: your contact address is clear and easy to locate. Click here and try some of these landing pages They are awesome and make life easy for you.
Mobile optimization: a lot of users will come in via mobile devices so your site must be optimised for mobile, speed and easy navigation
Info are properly arranged [/b]so that customers will not be confused

[b]4)Place your ads: Google AdWords or Bing Ads is more than enough tools to give you a step by step on how to place your ads with the keywords you have already.

5). Analyse data: Once that is done you have to keep monitoring your ads changes based on what users are searching for and with, (There some tools available to do that) and adjust your keyword accordingly. Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools, Google AdWords, Bing Ads all come handy to give you relevant info. Users behaviors change frequently over time.

6) Retargeting: Retargeting, is also referred to as remarketing which allows you to put your ads in front of users that have visited your site but did not make any purchase. This will help to serve the ads back in front bounced users, maybe this time they might actually complete their transactions. Retargeting tool has proven to help businesses get back about 98 percent of visitors or users who didn’t convert to sales.

Social media paid marketing is a big stuff and Google or Bing SEM can really push your products to people searching for it, get traffic immediately and your business ahead of your competitors.

Benefits

#Increase the company’s brand awareness and company’s brand equity of product.
#Increase site visibility which in turn increases website traffic.
#Ability to pin the locations and devices where traffic is coming from. With this, you can place third-party
adverts like billboards, poster, promotions etc.
#Advertise to an audience that’s already interested in you.
#Increase in targeted leads.
#Target your ads to users based on languages and locations.
#Place third-party ads to users based on physical locations where traffic are coming from.
#Competition advantage – Marketers can enable users to select their product over their competitors.
#Greater Return On Investment(ROI) — Compared to alternative advertising media, paid keywords search method are more effective.

http://techstackinc.com/2018/08/29/search-engine-marketing-the-online-advertising-that-can-help-boost-your-business-in-minutes/

You may be loosing money if you are not tapping into the potentials of search results