Search Engines — Basic Strategy
Audience: Small Business Owners
Purpose: This article provides an overview of SEM Strategy.
Author: Jonathan Bailey — © Bailey & Hall 2006 Article Date: 2006-09-14
Last Updated: 2007-02-27
Websites are very powerful tools for your business. They can help you with marketing, customer service, public relations, research, fulfillment — the list goes on and on. That's great right!
Well it is and it isn't. It is great to have all that versatility at your fingertips, but like any tool without a clear and well-defined purpose they can be hard to deal with.
So in order to come up with a search engine marketing plan for your website you must first determine what it is the website is meant to accomplish. If you have multiple goals then each one needs to be defined and considered separately.
Search engines work best when they can focus on something very specific. This is so for two reasons. First and most obviously you have a better shot at getting to the top of the rankings for "hand-made amish furniture" than you do for "furniture". And second if you sell "hand-made Amish furniture" a user that finds you under that search term is going to be a well-qualified shopper who is fairly likely to buy something. However, someone looking for "furniture" is fairly unlikely to buy your product.
First let's distinguish between "Organic SEM" and "Pay Per Click (PPC) SEM. Organic SEM refers to users finding your site by going to Google typing in a keyword and finding a link to your business in the results. PPC SEM is the practice of purchasing ad space on a search engine result set. On Google these would be the square ads that appear to the right of your browser under the title "Sponsored Links".
The starting point for either avenue is the same: keyword analysis. The goal is to take your target market (or a segment thereof) and discover what key words they use when searching for a product or service like yours. There are tools (and companies) that can help with this kind of thing but the basis of it all is a thorough understanding of your customer and market.
Once you have established a good set of keywords for your market segment you can move on. For a PPC strategy this consists of making ad buys for the keywords you have defined and directing those ads to the appropriate area of your site.
For organic marketing it gets a little more complicated and controversial. One segment of the SEO experts maintains that the most important part of the process is the optimization of your web pages. A long time ago this meant including your keywords in special html tag at the top of the page. Those days are long gone as search engines have moved on to more sophisticated algorithms. Today the search engines spend a lot more time analyzing the page copy itself. This means that hiring an SEO copywriter to rewrite all your web copy with your keywords firmly in mind can make a difference and many experts assert that this is where you should start.
Another group of SEO experts views this as not much better than the keyword strategy in the long run and that the real key to success lies in your link strategy — that is to say encouraging other websites to link to yours. Again, in times past this meant creating as many inbound links to your site as possible. Today an indescriminate "link spam" strategy like that is as liable to get you banned from a search engine as raise your ranking. Now the emphasis is on the quality of your links not the quantity. For example, a link from Oprah Winfrey's website to a self-help expert would be like gold.
My recommendation for the organic marketing, and it mirrors the recommendation of many of the experts, is to develop a good solid website with focused content that is useful to your target audience. Pursue links, where possible with carefully selected sites and stay away from the link spam strategy. This isn't a quick fix. Search engine traffic to your site isn't going to explode overnight. But those who do visit will be much more qualified customers and more likely to buy your product or services.
Back to Top