Search engine marketing (SEM) is an essential part of a company’s overall marketing plan. An effective search engine marketing campaign will bring more targeted traffic to your website, which ultimately translates to more leads and sales.
If your business provides local services such as cleaning, air-con servicing, catering, etc – you definitely need search engine marketing. This is because people will go to search engines and look for your services. But if your website is not listed on the search results when they are looking for your services, you will lose businesses to your competitors who are up on the search listing.
In this article, let me share with you some tips to set up an effective search engine marketing campaign:
1. Set your goals. Before you proceed with any search marketing campaign, you need to define the objectives and KPIs (key performance indicators). For example, if you provide a service, the KPI can be the number of email enquiry received from the campaign. It is important to set your goals so that you will know how well the campaign has performed.
2. Make sure that your ads are relevant. Relevancy is important when it comes to search marketing. People go to search engines to look for information that they want. So if the content of your website does not have what you promise on your ads, you will turn them off. This way, you will not get any conversion. So make sure that your ads are relevant to what you provide on your website.
3. Set the right budget for your campaign. With the right budget, you will be able to bid on more keywords and get enough traffic to see results.
4. Always split test your ads. Create 2 ads for your campaign and split test them. This is the only way to know which ad is performing better. Then delete the loser and create a new ad to challenge the winner. By doing this, you will drive more traffic to your site with the same budget.
5. Target the right people. Do not bid on keywords that are not relevant to your business. You need to put yourself in the shoes of your target audience. Understand what they will type in search engines to look for your services. Then bid on those keywords and show your ads to them.
Hope that with this article, you now understand how search marketing can help grow your business.
