Search Engine Marketing – Plan For Success
Search engine marketing is part science, part math, part elbow grease with a little bit of pixie dust. Oh, and good timing. So, no biggie, we can totally do this, right? Honestly, we can. Especially on a local based keywords.
This means you can improve your chances of ranking for your local Georgetown, Texas, or Austin business if you know what you are doing with good old fashioned search engine optimization. Now, granted, there may be some stiff competition for some sem terms. But that never hurt anybody.
Having a worthy sem opponent is good for you. But that’s the good timing and pixie dust part. Let’s get back to the elbow grease and math for now.
If you consider that ranking your pages in the search engines is like being in a race on Bing or Google then it makes sense to consider that yes, the direction and force of the wind on race day will impact your performance, but some of it is having the best tires and the hottest spark plugs, too. You may not be able to control the wind, but you can get the best tires in the industry.
When discussing these latter elements we are talking about sem math and science. Something anyone can tackle with reasonable expectations of success. And, if your opponent doesn’t tackle them at all, you will have an edge. And it doesn’t require paying for advertising or designing ads.
Like for any other advertising or marketing a plan is required and the best place to start is by looking at the keywords you want to rank for. For the DIY business owner the easiest place to start is the Google Keyword Planner. It helps you advertise in display networks on the internet with Adwords, their ppc service which stands for pay per click. It’s essentially a paid ads network. You can download reports about the best keywords or most searched for keywords to use as a guide for your offer or content.
A good number of digital marketing is based on this data. It provides the latest information for marketers and can be used for management of your website and mobile site as well.
Put in your niche (for example pizza or gutter repair) and hit search. You will find a lot of information about the words people search for, the search volume for these words, and the cost per click from Google’s Adsense program if you were to pay for traffic for these same words instead of using sem.
This information obviously gives you a good starting place for your research. You will want to include your local modifiers (such as gutter repair georgetown tx) once you hone in on the words you think you want to rank for to check your competition.
Search marketing essentially means you are marketing your product or service using the search engines, so you want to get yourself out there for every significant search term so you have a dog in the race.
What this means is you will want to take the words you find in the Keyword Planner and organize them, making a plan for content addressing each topic.
Each piece of content is an entry in a different race. You will want to make sure you have the best tires and spark plugs for each page. What this means is you will want to ensure the onpage optimization is the best it can be for each page.
Then of course you will tackle offpage factors to help boost ranking.
But let’s go back to the keyword research and mapping out a plan for your local search engine marketing. A really great article showing an easy-ish way to do this with excel was recently posted by Moz.com. If you don’t know about this site, for sure start checking it out. They will help you a lot.
The writer has this to say about the website planning process and his great tip:
“Working in SEO, I always find myself poring over data and looking for ways to expedite the analysis process. Analyzing data can often be tedious, mind-numbing, and boring work, so anything that can be done to speed up finding that needle in the haystack is almost always a good idea. A few months ago, I began using a formula in Excel to categorize data and I’m constantly finding new ways to use it.”
Once you’ve mapped things out you can start writing content or have it written by a reputable search marketing agency like Gibson Girls Marketing. Post the content on a regular basis (not all at once) and ping the posts.
You should also be sharing that content on Web 2.0 blogs and social media sites with links back to the content. A search marketing company or consultant like GGM can help with that, too, because we provide seo services.
You can also use RSS strategies to provide backlinks on popular blog sites. These are the kinds of tips we give in our free webinars for our users as resources. Join us sometime and learn about managing your website traffic and content.
