Best Practices for Search Engine Marketing
Pay Per Click Search Engine Marketing The Website: Building a successful online marketing strategy involves attracting traffic to your website via a Pay Per Click Campaign, but it also includes three key components once they arrive at the web site:
Phase 1: Create the Proper Selling Environment The Selling Environment is what will convince your Web site visitors to become your customers. Everything that visitors experience AFTER they arrive at a Web site is part of the Selling Environment. Some examples include:
It's important to create the proper selling environment BEFORE you move onto Phase 2. Otherwise, you'll waste time and money attracting people to your Web site. Make sure you can convert them to buyers, before you invest time and money bringing them to your site. Every business needs to do everything it can to stand out from the crowd -- differentiate itself from the competition. This is a major challenge for companies that sell products or provide services that are substantially the same as their competitors. If you are saying the same thing, the same way as your competition, you're in trouble. You must differentiate yourself and somehow you must standout. Your product or service must provide something different. The world is full of 'me-to' companies, businesses that do the same thing as dozens of other businesses. You must find that unique something in what you offer that makes you different. If your product or service is substantially the same as your competitors, perhaps you should market it differently, reduce prices, or maybe concentrate on the significant benefits it delivers rather than the standard 'same-old-same-old' that everyone else is touting. If all factors are equal -- even if all factors are similar -- visitors will browse other websites to make a decision. When they start guessing which site would be best to buy from, businesses that don’t stand-out will start losing business. There is a way to ensure one business is chosen over the competition -- you have to clearly point out the differences that are better than every other option available. Some ways to provide a difference are as follows:
Phase 2: Attract QUALIFIED Traffic to your site via Pay Per Click Campaigns Qualified traffic is different from ordinary traffic. For example, a person who goes to a search engine and searches for "Dallas Honda Accord" is probably interested in buying a Honda Accord. If your Web site sells this car model, this is the ideal kind of traffic to attract. A higher percentage of these visitors should convert to paying customers versus most other sources. However, the prospect must first be able to find your dealership in the Search Engines, and if your dealership is one of the top three, via our Pay Per Click Campaign, this will be an easy task. The prospect that comes from the search engine is actively looking for information on a specific make and model car – Honda Accord. This is similar to someone who opens the Yellow Pages to look for a company that sells a specific product or service. In both examples, the prospect is often ready to buy and is just looking for the best seller. Therefore, people who come to your site via banner ads, pop-ups, and print advertising will be much less qualified than people who discover your site via the Search Engines. But of course you must be at the top of the first page of the Search Engine, and if you are in the top three, you will positively acquire more visitors than if you are in the 8th, 9th, or 10th, position. Even though Search Engine visitors are more qualified prospects, there can still be a large variation in the likelihood of them making a purchase depending on the search terms they use. For example, which prospect would be more qualified: someone who searches for "software testing program" or someone who searches for "software?" The first prospect would be more qualified. Software is too broad a term, and the person who searches for the more specific item is usually further along in the buying process. In many cases, he already knows that he wants – software testing programs – and he's just trying to find the best website to buy it from. There are instances where consumers search on a specific brand or keyword, arrive at a site, and then leave without making a purchase. Searching for a more specific keyword phrase implies a more educated consumer. Depending on how competitive your offering is compared with the offerings of other online merchants, highly focused keyword phrases may be an advantage or a disadvantage. If you have the strongest selling environment and your price is competitive, then you will be in a good position to convert this prospect into a customer. What about the second prospect, the one who searched for "software?" This person doesn't know exactly what he wants, so he's less likely to make an immediate purchase. However, if your website displays attractive pricing and incentives, then this non-specific search term may generate a new customer. The lesson here is that you can't make a blanket assumption that specific search terms will always convert better. The search term that a person uses can be a good indication of the type of prospect you're dealing with. You can use this information to segment your market. Many companies recognize that different types of offers will appeal to different types of consumers so they will promote a portfolio of Websites rather than a single site. One site may target the high-end of the market. Another site may target bargain hunters. A third site may target a particular ethnic group. The possibilities are limitless, and therefore, a multitude of Keywords and Keyword phrases must be used to get the customer to your website. After you've identified your target markets, selecting the best search terms to focus on can still be a difficult task. Beginners often make the mistake of focusing on search terms that are too general. The problem with general keyword phrases is that it's often extremely difficult to achieve search engine placements for them. For example, searching for "vehicle" on Google returns 16 million pages. You have a slim chance of getting your site listed on the first page of Google for this keyword. There are just too many other pages competing for the top positions. Furthermore, you'll normally convert a significantly lower percentage of those visitors to paying customers. Targeting phrases so specific that no one is searching for them is another common mistake made by novices and even veteran marketers. Ideally, you should be somewhere in the middle. Optimize your Web site for phrases that are searched often enough to make them worthwhile, but not so general that they become unattainable or have too low a conversion rate. There are great resources for keyword phrase research. We use two resources that provide a vast database of millions of search terms. We use the resources in order to learn how often that phrase is searched and how competitive it is on the various search engines. Our resources also provide a list of related search terms, and a competitive analysis for each of those phrases. It truly takes the guesswork out of what keywords and phrases should be targeted. Since much of the competition will not bother with this sophisticated business initiative, our Pay Per Click service with the correct keywords and keyword phrases can provide a terrific competitive advantage. Phase 3: Measure the Results and Adjust as Needed No one can predict the outcome of any marketing campaign with perfect accuracy. Successful marketing comes out of a never-ending cycle of testing and refining. The sales copy and the selling environment, if there is one, must be examined to determine if these elements are doing their job effectively, or if they could be improved. Businesses must continually analyze their websites to ensure that once the customer is there, that the customer will do what the business wants him to do – phone, email or buy the product. Web marketing is a journey, and a continual examination of the content and functionality is important to maximize sales results. Pay Per Click Campaigns: Search Engine Marketing Campaigns are a must for businesses wishing to boost their sales. Online marketing has become more and more a distinctive and important aspect in the development and evolution of any company, big or small, which aims at reaching a specific range of potential customers and increasing sales. For just about any business seeking to advertise online, Pay Per Click search listings should come first and be used to their maximum potential before investing elsewhere. They are the foundation of most online advertising plans, delivering the most precise targeting and the furthest reach for the lowest cost. The concept of Pay Per Click or PPC search advertising is simple -- you have your listing placed within or alongside search results in exchange for paying some fee each time someone clicks on your listing in those search results. Most search engines set advertisers against each other in auction-style bidding for the highest positions on search result pages. There are several benefits to Pay Per Click advertising that make it useful to just about any web business, and make it so important that it should be exploited to its fullest before advertising in any other medium. BENEFIT #1: TARGETING Targeting is essential to any marketing, online or off. In order to be effective, ads have to reach the right people. If that's not happening, you're just wasting your money. More than anything else, people turn to search engines to find things they need on the Web. Pay Per Click search engine advertising lets businesses capture these people while they are actively seeking out their product or service. By listing a website under specific search results, advertisers can capture a target audience and pre-qualify them with the ad at the same time. By the time the visitor is on the website, the business knows that they are looking for their product or service and have an interest in the particular offer. BENEFIT #2: REACH No matter how robust the radio station, magazine or newspaper, their advertising potential will never reach as many individuals as the top search engines. Google and Yahoo! each reach 80% of the Internet user population and display Pay Per Click ads above and alongside search results. Billions of searches are made every month and Pay Per Click advertisers can easily be listed at the very top of the very first page. BENEFIT #3: COST Pay Per Click search ads cost nothing until an interested individual actually clicks through to the specified website. Even with the competitive bidding process that pits one advertiser against another for the top spots at most PPC search engines, costs per click can still be just pennies. If you work out the average cost to acquire a new visitor from other mediums, it'll likely end up higher than the search engine ad without the benefits of precise targeting and pre-qualifying the visit with the ad text. It becomes clear why Pay Per Click advertising should be the foundation of an online advertising plan when you consider the combined benefits of the targeting, costs and reach of this medium:
PPC search advertising is targeted, affordable and abundantly available. It should be exploited in full, at Google, Yahoo and MSN before spending money elsewhere, as almost any other medium will be less targeted, less controllable and more expensive. To fully understand the importance and necessity of implementing a Web Marketing Campaign, it is important to look first at the phenomenal statistics regarding Internet use. For example:
There can be no question that the Internet is continuing to grow at an amazing pace. While the fact that so many consumers are online is important, it is even more crucial to understand what these consumers are doing while online. The two most outstanding reasons people use the Internet is to communicate (email) and to research (using search engines)
When consumers go to the Internet, they use Search Engines because they are able to find the products they want along with reviews, descriptions, consumer ratings, and the best price possible. Consumers are less concerned with where they buy their products as much as they are concerned with how much product they can get for their dollar. People will easily drive for 45 minutes to save a hundred dollars, much less a thousand. Thus, each day millions of people use search engines to look for items they want to buy on the Internet. Those businesses that appear on the first page of these searches are getting 50% to 70% of the business from these customers. There is little doubt that potential customers are currently using search engines to search for information regarding healthcare in cities throughout this nation. The only real question is what is being done to help these prospective customers find your website. Search engines use complex, mathematical algorithms to determine which web sites are ranked high and which are not. If a web site matches the requisite criteria, it is ranked high, and if it doesn’t, then it is not. It’s that simple. Well almost, there are lots of things to establish to rank high. For instance, having lots of visitors is one of the most important. Well if you can’t be found, how do you get lots of visitors? And so this is where companies like Advantix Marketing are so important. We basically let people interested in purchasing a car in your city find you high on the Search Engines. Ok so we CONNECT them for you. We do our job and work hard to get qualified and interested people to come to your website. The second phase of Web Marketing is for you to CAPTURE the prospective buyer. This is done by having a website that will convert the prospective buyer into a customer and by having health care providers quickly responding to phone calls and emails in such a fashion to get the patient to come to the clinic. The CLOSE is a sophisticated process that begins at the initiation of the communication. Your organization provides excellent training for this action and the doctors provide outstanding medical care. In conclusion, Web Marketing is an ongoing process that is evaluated by Advantix Marketing on a continual basis, but it is not only our responsibility, it is also the dealer’s responsibility to ensure that the website is a well oiled machine to increase sales. We want to be part of your team to make this happen and are just a phone call away.
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