Search Engine Marketing

Internet Marketing or Search Engine Marketing is advertising that appears next to natural (organic) search results on search engines. Creating an AdWords campaign involves selecting a group of key word phrases, creating the related ad copy, and then bidding the maximum amount you are willing to pay if someone clicks on your ad. The ads can be used to give your site visibility when you don’t rank organically or when you are looking to build name recognition.

Need Help with SEM?

I provide Search Engine Marketing Services for local companies and have a great deal of experience working with Google AdWords, Yahoo Marketing (formerly Overture), and Microsoft AdCenter. If you are looking for someone to assist you with search engine marketing, contact me.

Getting Started / Open an Account

To get started you will need to set up an account with each of the search engines. It’s painless and there is no initial cash outlay. Many of the hosting companies will give you ad credits for Google or Microsoft as an enticement to sign-up and the major search engines give these away at tradeshows and marketing events. The credits come in the form of a code and like a coupon there is a place to enter the code when you sign up.

Find Phrases that relate to your Business

Each of these sites has tools to help you refine your search phases. You type in a word or phrase and the search engine will show you popular related phrases. Google has a keyword tool you can use without an account. There are also independent tools to do this. WordTracker is a popular one and I especially like AdGooRoo as it will show you how you and your competitors rank for phrases. There are also more sophisticated products like HitWise that partner with ISP and search engines to show you what people are doing and where they go before and after they hit your web site or your competitors. Once you have your initial list of words you will see that with Google and Microsoft there are three variations on how to apply the terms “broad”, “phrase”, and “exact” match. Yahoo only has “standard” (exact match plus plurals) and “advanced” (any combination that includes your phrase) matching. Broad means that any combination of the words can trigger the ad. Phrase means the ad can be triggered anytime all the words appear (in order) and exact means only the phrase in the exact order without other words will trigger the ad.

More on broad versus phrase match

All the engines use essentially the same bidding system to determine your ad placement. They multiply the bid amount times the click through rate and move the most profitable ads to the top. You pay a penny more than the next ad down is bidding.  You will want to set a daily limit to keep yourself safe as the industry is riddled with click fraud and if you make a competitor mad he can drain your account to put himself back in position.

Bid Separately for Content

When you set up your campaigns, look for the “bid separately for content”. Content ads appear on websites by matching the ad to the content of the page. This can be good if your ads are appearing on a page with expert commentary. However, there is big money in these ads and the temptation to generate fraudulent clicks can be very high for these sites. To be safe, you will want to bid separately on content ads and track the results or restrict your ads to search.

Create and Test Multiple Ads 

I recommend that you generate multiple ads for each set of words. The ads should be worded to complete the words that call the ad. If you are using repair phrases “bicycle repair”, “wheel repair”. etc, you will want an ad that says:

Huntsville Bike Repair
Locally owned and operated
we service all makes and models.

If you are keying in buy phrases, like “sale”, “closeout”, “factory direct”. you will want to have an ad that says:

Huntsville Bike Sales
We match internet prices
and offer local service.

Dynamic Keyword Insertion 

There is also something called Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI). DKI lets you dynamically insert the search phrase. For example, if someone enters “cannondale bike sale” and you have phrase “Cannondale” you can use DKI to generate an ad like this:

Sale on (Cannondale) Bikes
Lowest Prices of the season
on (Cannondale) parts and accessories.

DKI can be especially useful when you are trying to deliver custom ads for a large number of items. Using DKI, each ad that is presented has a custom appearance that can be delivered dynamically from your list of phrases and keywords.

Landing Pages

Part of creating any campaign is deciding where the ad should take the searcher. This page is referred to as a “landing page”.  While many ads dump the searcher at the front page of the website, it is usually a better idea to create custom pages that match the theme of the ad, orient the searcher to the site and contain a clear call to action.

Tune for Performance

Each search engine has a slightly different approach to the same end. All will allow you to upload a spreadsheet of phrases and ads, which can dramatically reduce the time to set up your initial campaigns. While most people set up identical campaigns across the engines, the audiences for these search engines is slightly different and so each should be tuned individually. Break your campaigns up in to categories to address different needs and set a conversion metric to tune campaigns for optimum results. (see article)