How to Maximize Paid Search Results

Because of increasing competition that has led to higher advertising costs with pay-per-click marketing, many battle-scarred – “do-it-yourself” – businesses have not realized their desired objectives. Although publicized as a straightforward, self-service marketing tool, pay-per-marketing involves far more knowledge than most businesses are able to invest in developing in-house. Faced with a moderately or less performing pay-per-click marketing program and the pressure to allocate resources elsewhere, many businesses choose to drop their pay-per-click marketing entirely – leaving a vast potential of sales for their competitors to harvest.

If you face pay-per-click marketing challenges, before you decide to drop the program, try these proven strategies to get it producing your desired results.Discover These Proven Strategies to Produce Quick Results.

Choosing the correct keywords for your site

In this article, we focus on the correct way of finding out the keywords for which you should optimize your site for the search engines. This article will give you the formula for the Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI) – a mathematical formula which I have developed to help you determine which keywords you should be optimizing your site for.

Step 1: Open your text editor or word processor and write down all the words and phrases that you might have searched for if you were looking for a company which offers products and services similar to yours.

For example, suppose your company organizes packaged tours to Australia. Here’s a list of phrases that I might have searched for if I were planning to make a trip to Australia:

tourism in Australia
travel to Australiatravelling
in Australiatravel agencies
in Australiatravelling agencies
in AustraliaAustralian travel agencies

Of course, the keywords that came to your mind may have been different. But that’s not important – the important thing is to get an initial list of keywords.You may be wondering why I have not used single word keywords. Here’s why:

Twelve Tips When Choosing a Search Marketing Consultant or Agency

Most businesses currently running SEM campaigns could vastly improve their performance with outside help. I can say this with confidence for two reasons: first, having worked with dozens of companies over the last eight years (most of whom have received millions in funding from top-tier Silicon Valley venture capital firms), I can speak from experience that I rarely go to a company that is doing search 100% right. This can range from very basic errors (no tracking and thus no insight into ROI) to more complex but no less important problems (misunderstanding of bidding strategy, insufficient ad text or landing page testing).

Second, most businesses aren’t in the business of search marketing – as such, they never really focus enough attention on their campaigns to really get it right. After meeting the senior executives at all those companies, as well as the marketing departments, I know that the personnel at these firms are incredibly bright and dedicated. But when search marketing is one of 15 things you need to do in a day, inevitably you end up doing a lot of things poorly instead of a few things well.

As a result, a lot of companies these days turn to outside consultants or agencies to help them with their search marketing campaigns. This can be an incredibly smart decision – if you pick the right firm. Picking the wrong firm can be a massive time suck and a financial disaster. Being someone who has been on both sides of the search consultant/agency negotiations (choosing the outsourcer and pitching to be the outsourced consultant), I’ve learned a few things along the way that will help you to make the right choice on your search marketing consultant or agency. Here’s my top 12 tips (not in order):

Five Steps to Effective Keyword Research

There’s no getting around it. Keyword research is a vitally important aspect of your search engine optimization campaign. If your site is targeting the wrong keywords, the search engines and your customers may never find you, resulting in lost dollars and meaningless rankings. By targeting the wrong keywords, you not only put valuable advertising dollars at risk, you are also throwing away all the time and energy you put into getting your site to rank for those terms to begin with. If you want to stay competitive, you can’t afford to do that.

The keyword research process can be broken down into the following phases:

Phase 0 – Demolishing Misconceptions

Phase 1 – Creating the list and checking it twice

Phase 2 – Befriending the keyword research tool

Phase 3 – Finalizing your list

Phase 4 – Plan your Attack

Phase 5 – Rinse, Wash Repeat

Phase 0 – Demolishing Misconceptions

Over the years, we’ve had the opportunity to work with a wide array of wonderful clients. And as different and diverse as their sites and the individuals running them may have been, many had one thing in common: they were self-proclaimed keyword research mavens right out of the gate.

Or so they thought

One of the most common misconceptions about conducting keyword research for a search engine optimization campaign is the belief that you already know which terms a customer would use to find your site. You don’t. Not without first doing some research anyway. You may know what your site is about and how you, the site owner, would find it, but it’s difficult to predict how a paying customer would go about looking for it.This is due to site owners evaluating their site through too narrow of a lens, causing them to come up with words that read like industry jargon, not viable keywords.

Remember, your customer probably doesn’t work in the same industry that you do. If they did, they wouldn’t need you.

Selecting and Evaluating Keyphrases for Search Engine Marketing

Many businesses recognize that search engines can bring volumes of highly targeted prospects to their website, typically at a fraction of the cost of traditional marketing. Unfortunately, these same companies often overlook the most important part of their search engine marketing campaigns, which is keyphrase selection and evaluation. Keyphrases (those phrases that potential customers are using to find products or services on search engines) are the building block of any search engine marketing strategy. It is essential that they are chosen carefully, or else the remainder of the campaign, no matter how effective the implementation, will likely be in vain. What follows is a three-step process that goes over the process of compiling, selecting, and evaluating the ongoing performance of keyphrases for search engines