search engine marketing

Let Customers Come To You

People are actively trying to find you and your services or products. In fact, according to the book Search Engine Marketing, Inc.: Driving Search Traffic to Your Company’s Web Site, by Mike Moran and Bill Hunt, 64% of Web surfers use search as their primary method of finding what they want and need, and 59% of U.S. users do so on a daily basis. In March 2009 alone, according to online research firm comScore, some 14.3 billion web searches were performed, up from 11 billion during the same month in 2008.

So are you making it easy for prospects and customers to find you? Search engine marketing (SEM) encompasses the process of using online research tools—such as Google, MSN, Yahoo!, Microsoft Bing, YELLOWPAGES.COM, local search engines and others—as vehicles for bringing more visitors to your Website. It’s all about getting higher rankings in search results, which leads to higher numbers of clickthroughs, which, in turn, means more customers.

SEM has grown in direct proportion to the search needs and habits of Web users. “Five years ago, SEM was almost an asterisk; a budget remainder,” observes Sara Holoubek, corporate strategy consultant, President of the Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization Board of Directors and SEM columnist. “Now we’re seeing it actually driving the media mix in some cases. It’s a great place to start in terms of lead generation. And there’s an opportunity cost to not being found. While SEM is a global online activity, it’s most effective on a local level. We all live locally; we buy groceries, go to the dry cleaners, eat at restaurants and go to movies locally, so we tend to search that way. If you’re less visible online you’ll lose out to a more visible local competitor who’s higher in the results rankings.”

Creating an effective SEM program means more than simply building a Website and paying for clicks. At the heart of an effective initiative are the key words you choose. When users search for information on the Web, they use their own key words and the search engine then finds the Web pages that best match the terms. If you design your Web pages so that the most relevant keywords are present in the most important locations—your meta tags, title and content—you’re helping to optimize the site from an SEM standpoint.

Here are a few key word core points to consider:

• Meta tags—Meta tags—snippets of code, or HTML tags, placed on the top of a Web page—are the first true description of your page. To help the search engines, you may want to target three to five key meta phrases per page, but no more. Say you sell refrigerators. Create meta tags or key words that say, “Refrigerators,” “Amana refrigerators,” “Frigidaire refrigerators,” etc. Limit your descriptions to about 250 characters per page.
• Title—Your title the clickable link off the search engine to your site and tells your basic story. Your title should contain the primary keyword you want the page to rank for (i.e., Amana, Frigidaire and GE refrigerators). Keep the titles to 90 characters at most.
• Content—If you keep to about three to four paragraphs per page, with your keywords positioned as high on the page as possible, you’ll increase your Web search relevancy. Search engines can’t read graphics or text in graphics, so the more wording you offer, the more opportunity you have to rank groups or combinations of words. But don’t overdo it. Try to get entire keyword phrases in your content at least once if not twice.

“In determining your key words, you need to think like a consumer of your product and service,” asserts Holoubek. “The solution or benefit is more important than the product or service. Think of it this way: If you spill red wine on your carpet, you won’t search for detergent, but for a way to remove a red wine stain. In the world of search, it’s about providing solutions.”