As a social media marketing company, have you been trying to boost your presence on various digital platforms? Search Engine Marketing (SEM), also known as PPC or Pay Per Click advertising, is the best way to go about it.
However, for small businesses, this could be a minefield!
In other words, only when you execute your SEM campaign correctly, you will be successful in producing potential leads – not to mention the higher possibilities of converting leads into your loyal customers.
Before you dive straight in to start curating your campaign, it is crucial to know some of the do’s and don’ts of search engine marketing for 2020.
The Do’s of Search Engine Marketing
- Do – Understand the Target Audience
Be it any marketing strategy, it is essential for you to know your audience properly since that helps you reach out to them effectively.
You should also ask yourself the following questions before you create the campaign:
- Who are your ideal customers?
- What are they interested in?
- Which social media channels do they use regularly?
- Where and when are they looking for information/products?
Finding answers to these questions can help design a brief yet targeted marketing plan and maximize the efficacy of the overall campaign.
- Do – Carry Out Thorough Keyword Research
There are various keyword research tools available that can help discover the volume, cost, ranking, and competition for a specific keyword. However, the task of searching for relevant terms that are in line with your business can be a tad difficult.
There are alternative meanings, long-tail terms, and synonyms that you need to discover – all of this requires some time along with specialized keyword tools.
This step is crucial, because without keyword research you may overpay for totally unrelated terms. Or even worse, you may find out queries that people hardly search for and lose the chance of advertising your business.
- Do – Write a Striking Content
If you want to be among one of the top digital marketing companies, then you need to create content that is concise yet attention-grabbing. Here, the key is to strike the right balance between quantitative and qualitative elements.
In order to create content that improves your conversion rate, you need to concentrate on boosting the ‘click-through’ rate.
To do so, you must make sure that every piece of content has an incredibly catchy headline, a couple of keywords relevant to your business, and a CTA (call to action) at the end of it.
The Don’ts of Search Engine Marketing
- Don’t – Focus on Broad Search Terms
It might feel good to focus on search terms with 5,000 or for that matter, 500 searches per day. But, in actuality, these keywords take up only around 30% of the overall search conducted in a day. The other 70% lie in the search performed for long-tail keywords.
Although a long-tail keyword may be searched only for a couple of times throughout the day, when put together, they comprise most of the search volume.
The use of long-tail keywords also helps with your conversion rates since it grabs the customer’s attention during the conversion/buying cycle.
- Don’t – Fail to Set Up Your Conversion Tracker
The most essential part of SEM is to test, review, and analyze the performance of your campaign. Failing to do so will only lead you to lose all your future rewards.
You must set up a conversion tracking tool, as that enables you to keep tabs on the campaign’s performance and how well it is producing sales, email signups, leads, downloads, and other essential actions.
This tool also records every data so that you can figure out which sections of the campaign are performing and which aren’t. This way you get to optimize the keyword and text of your content. But you also have to place ‘tags’ on the site to get your conversion started.
It may sound easy, but it’s tricky to get this right. However, doing it correctly is imperative since incorrect conversion tracking is worse than no tracking at all.
Conclusion
SEM can get tedious and overwhelming, but only if you’re stressed out or doing it wrong.
So, try taking your campaigns a notch higher and work on beating your own numbers. Be creative when it comes to sharing a message or play with different keywords. Finally, make sure you are engaging with your customers to receive their inputs and feedback.
