Know What You Are Buying
Often, I am amazed at how businesses do not know whether their search marketing program is performing or not. By not knowing this, businesses will not know whether their money is well spent - much less how to spend it well.
Keep in mind that search marketing is not primarily a technical discipline. It is a marketing discipline. Webmasters and Web developers are programmers and designers. They are intelligent, so many have a basic idea of search marketing. However, a basic idea of search marketing is just not good enough. It takes more than a basic understanding of search marketing techniques and tools to create a campaign that will allow businesses to be competitive and to take full advantage of search engines. Effective search marketing needs to be implemented by someone who does search marketing everyday and understands the many steps needed to achieve top search visibility.
Find out what steps your search marketing team is taking. Don't be intimidated by the SEM jargon. Your search marketers should be able to explain their actions in plain English and why these steps are effective. Work to understand the rhyme and reason of your marketer's actions.
Are your search marketers spending time doing search engine optimization that is not effective such as submitting URLs to search engines or relying on meta-keywords? We often see such outdated search engine optimization methods that have little or no impact. If that is your search optimization program, then you are not competing for non-paid search visibility. Knowing how your Search Marketing budget is being used will help you understand the results you are (or aren't) receiving.
Instead of relying on outdated techniques, your search optimizers should be refining content to better use keywords. They should be generating links from other Websites to improve search visibility.
What kind of link building are they attempting? Are they engaged in organic link building such as submitting to Social Web communities, Blogs, and forums where links improve Google search visibility? Or are they making submissions to scores of free Web directories that have no impact on search visibility? Are they attempting reciprocal linking with Websites not involved with your topic? If so, they are spending time and your money on techniques with limited results.
Is your Pay Per Click program on auto-pilot? Or is there active management and optimization of results? If your PPC is not actively being optimized for ROI, then you are spending more money than you need to.
Continue reading: Guarantees Are Nice, But What is being Guaranteed?
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