Search Engine Marketing Strategy
Maxim Number One: Search engine marketing strategy is only effective if it produces a good return on your investment (ROI)!
Search engine marketing strategy must consider the possibilities with both natural search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click advertising (PPC).
Search engine optimization is a long-range strategy that costs more up front and pays higher dividends in the long run.
Pay-per-click advertising is a short-term strategy to get targeted traffic to your website right now.
The right mix of PPC and SEO for your particular website will depend upon the ROI you can obtain for each.
Regardless of that mix, effective search engine marketing strategy must focus on more than merely attracting traffic. The money you spend of obtaining search engine traffic will be wasted if your website does not make visitors want to become customers!
Strategy for Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
The strategy with pay-per-click is whatever it takes to get the most bang for the buck since every click is going to cost you money. The way the ad is composed will affect how much a click will cost on Google AdWords. Google has its own mathematically determined "opinions" about ad relevance, and not satisfying them can double the keyword price! We'll compose several ads and see which ones are most cost-effective and results-effective.
Your ads need to be strategically composesd to qualify your traffic. You do not want people to click on your ad (costing you perhaps $8.00 for the click) and then realize that your site isn't at all what they were looking for!
Some ads may be best confined to run only in specific geographical areas. You'll want to use "broad match" (which will make the ads show up for a wide variety of related terms) to broaden the reach of some keywords, but for others broad match will result in huge volumes of unqualified traffic--an expensive mistake!.
For some keywords, targeting AdSense ads (the ads that go on websites) will be cost-effective, but frequently you'll find that you get better qualified traffic if the ads are run only on actual search results pages.
Effective pay-per-click strategies are a matter of experience and observation, and it is imperative that you have web analytics installed and tied in directly with your pay-per-click campaigns.
Strategy For Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
When selecting keywords to optimize for natural (organic) SEO, the results will be much better if an overall strategy is applied rather than just focusing on each keyword as an isolated entity. This is a fairly recent phenomenon. It's related to the sophisticated new "meaning-aware" indexing algorithms some of the search engines (notably Google) are starting to use now such as "latent semantic indexing".
When Google arrives to index your site, it already knows the entire vocabulary of your industry! It even knows that vocabulary in context of the relative importance of various individual key phrases or keywords. Therefore you should actually make a point of optimizing the most "important" keywords that relate to your industry even though they are ridiculously "expensive" (see our article on choosing keywords for SEO to understand what an "expensive" keyword is). You optimize them not because you expect to receive high rankings or traffic from them any time soon, but because they make it clear to Google that yours is an "authority" site.
When you do this you are establishing a clear context that will synergize all of your related keywords by showing exactly how and why all of your pages are relevant to a variety of search keywords.
This is actually a large and interesting topic and it's the essense of the overall approach we now take to SEO. We call it "Architectural SEO™".
