Chalk out a SEM Plan
The search engine marketing environment is undergoing enormous changes as the industry and the Internet mature. You need to keep in pace with the changing arena and adapt your website accordingly. A continuous tracking of a website has to be done and plans have to be chalked out accordingly to get effective results.
Paying to a search engine ensures a guaranteed top placement in its results. This kind of advertising includes sponsorships, pay-per-click advertising, and contextual advertising. This kind of strategy sometimes becomes essential to follow in order to get results at the earliest.
Lets go through the various steps that you need to follow to get optimum results:
Find the Right Keywords and your Top Competitors
Before you begin, find out where your website stands in comparison to your competitors. Once this is done find out the best keywords and phrases that can enhance your site.
Keyword Report
This report looks for the keywords and phrases on your site and reports their popularity on the web for a previous month. These will be compared to other popular Internet key word phrases.
These may seem like totally different steps, however, when put them together they form a process which is in conjunction with each other. A thorough research on the keywords has to be done to find out which will be the right ones that can be used on your web pages. Apart from helping us decide the apt keywords to target, this report is made in such a way that it will also points out your major competitors.
Find out your Competitors
A thorough research about your competitors is then done. For eg: after we find out your 5 top most direct competitors, we plan the strategy accordingly. This analysis is done by an expert who will go through their web pages thoroughly and prepare a report. The results are prepared after evaluating the competitors and how well they understand SEO/SEM. Since link popularity is so crucial in obtaining a high Google ranking, we will use our analysis tools to report clearly what other web sites are linking to your competitor's site. This comprehensive link report will help you understand your competitor’s online campaigns, services, announcements, products, their partners ect.
Web Site Content and Copy Management
The content, layout and the design of a site contributes greatly in the rankings on a search engine. Each search engine will index page content into their database against their own set of rules. The pages that are prepared have to be made keeping in mind the rules so that they are not penalized or banned from search engines. Also keyword relevancy, frequency and density also have to be kept in mind.
We will make recommend changes on your web pages according to the reports that are prepared and keeping the above in mind.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search engine optimization (SEO) is basically designing, writing, and HTML-coding a Web site to maximize the chance that its pages will appear at the top of search engine results for selected keywords and phrases.
Even if you decide to go for the paid-inclusion programs, the sites must be properly optimized for high rankings as such programs do not guarantee placements.
The last component of a successful SEO campaign is link popularity. That's the number and quality of links that point to your Web site. Link quality (links from popular, highly trafficked and/or respected sites) carries far more weight than link quantity.
This involves observing our customer’s web pages and their rankings, analyzing high-ranked web pages and their content according to the SE rules, strategizing the tasks that need to be done in order to increase the rankings of our customer’s web pages, making appropriate changes on the in the content and layout and even re-submitting the website to Search engines to get the right results. For optimum rankings across many search engines it will be necessary to create separate targeted web pages for each SE. Also it is essential to know how pages are linked to each other, and the way sites are linked to other sites as this can also have considerable impact on search engine visibility
Managing and Tracking PPC Campaigns
Google, one of the leading search engines functions on the PPC model. It is the Pay-Per-Click leader. Therefore, we also use PPC to find out where exactly your web site will be listed and how much it will cost. Therefore we prepare this report which will presents calculated estimates on what the monthly cost would be for each keyword.
To have this complete control, we devote time and work with our customers on the words and phrases that should be targeted for PPC campaigns. We also need to create the descriptive marketing catch words that work along with the target keywords to drive quality traffic to the site.
Bid and AD changes occur within minutes on Google. Based on the customer's bid criteria and spending limits, guidelines are established for bid management. After it is decided which campaigns to test, a plan will be put in place to run the ads over a certain length of time and then to track the results. This will determine which campaigns work better than others. Each keyword/phrase will have its own stats report.
Submit and Monitor
After all the research and the implementation of the strategies are completed, the site is finally ready to submit to the search engine. Here again a plan is recommended to our customers which is cost-benefit and outlines the amount of time the site will take to be spider up and hopefully appear in the Top20 or Top10. After the submission is done, it has to be monitored on a daily basis starting 72-hours after first submission. By that time, we expect to see evidence of search-engine spiders appearing in server logs and may even see a debut placement for the site.
One of the greatest benefits of a paid-inclusion program is the increased frequency of spider-visits to a website. Most paid-inclusion programs promise repeat spider visits every 48 - 72 hours, making the SEO job a bit easier as we can see the effects of tweaks in fairly short order.
Search Engines do support the free-submission sites but they do show preference to sites that have paid fees. This ensures more traffic to the website.
Return on Investment (ROI)
The real measure of the success or the ROI of search engine marketing can be measured by the site traffic that converts to sales. A visitor is tracked until they make a purchase. This can be done even when the purchase occurs a long time after the initial visit. When a website is information based, it will lead the visitor to other landing pages. The landing pages are created in such a way to distinguish the keyword campaigns and compel the user to contact you either by a web form or a phone call.
The concerned clients are thinking about the new fee structure introduced by Yahoo and the impending costs associated with these new fees. With Yahoo stating they will charge $0.15 to $0.30 per click for sites participating in the Site Match program, and costs between $0.15 to $1.00 per click for much larger sites feeding data to Yahoo through the Site XChange program, businesses need to know the least expensive methods of getting prominent placements. In order to provide the best possible advise, StepForth is now conducting a cost-benefit analysis for all new campaigns and will be applying this analysis to currently existing ones.
Client/Sector Communication
Business thrives on sales. Sales thrive on customers. Every customer wants to know where the money that he is investing is going. All humans react better to known quantities than they do to unknown quantities. And to find this out, we believe in interacting and communicating and understanding your clients. So try and be as truthful with your offerings and answers. An honest answer even though it may contain harsh facts will be more acceptable than misleading your client. Also keep your clients updated regularly on the changes made on tour web pages.
Conclusion
Understand your site, identify its needs and then accordingly opt for a SEM firm who can provide you with the right services. Every firm has different offerings. Some firms may specialize in search engine advertising while others might focus on SEO.
If your site requires the modification of site design and copy, then search engine advertising campaign is the right option. If you need to redesign or re-write your site, the best choice would be a firm that specializes in SEO. So know you’re the requirements of your website and choose accordingly.
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