Browsing Category: "SEM"
How to Survive in the PPC Jungle
Pay per click advertising, usually referred to as PPC, is a very popular form of internet marketing because it can be an incredible way to drive targeted traffic to your website and make money from it. At first glance it seems great because the only time you have to pay for your advertising is if somebody actually clicks on the ad.
Pay per click advertising looks so easy on the surface but there are numerous pitfalls to using PPC in your internet marketing business. In this post I will point out a few of those pitfalls and tell you how to get around them. Hopefully, after reading this, you’ll end up giving yourself the best chance of actually having success with your PPC campaign.
Probably the biggest pitfall to pay per click advertising is keyword selection. Too many beginning internet marketers don’t know how to properly choose keywords and end up bidding on keywords that drain their bank account very quickly. For example, let’s say somebody was selling a cure for acne. A typical keyword to target would be acne cure, or at least you would think so. But what if your cure was a natural one? If somebody was looking for a medical cure or didn’t believe in natural cures, seeing your sales page would probably not trigger a sale, whereas using the keyword phrase “natural acne cure” would. So keyword selection is very important for your PPC campaign, as well as just about any aspect of internet marketing.
Another pitfall of pay per click is geo-targeting. Most internet marketers don’t really give much thought to targeting their PPC campaign to a specific geographical location, but the truth is that running your ad all over the world is not a very good idea. The reason is simple. The world is made up of many different cultures and not all of them are going to be prospects for your particular offer. In some cases, only certain countries would be a viable target for an ad, depending on what the product is. So it’s important to know who your target market is and advertise only to that market.
Then, of course, there is how much people bid for their keywords and the position that they shoot for with their ads. So many beginning internet marketers think that they have to shoot for the number one position on the page. The truth is the top position is a breeding ground for freebie seekers and people who really aren’t ready to buy yet. They’re just starting their search. Lots of money can be wasted on the top position when you could do even better targeting positions 3-7.
Pay per click can be, without a doubt, one of the best forms of internet marketing. But these PPC pitfalls… keyword selection, geo targeting and ad position, along with so many others, can turn your pay per click campaign into a nightmare. That’s why it’s important to make sure that you get yourself a solid PPC education before venturing into pay per click advertising.
Are Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Different?
Many people use the terms Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) interchangeably as if they are the same thing. But they are very different internet marketing techniques and should not be referred to as one thing.
Search Engine Marketing is a term to describe the full array of promotional technologies used by internet marketers to increase their online traffic as well as visibility for their websites. Search Engine Optimization is just one part of the whole SEM equation. When you talk about SEO you are basically referring to a number of strategies for getting a website ranked highly in search engines.
Search engine marketing experts employ several internet marketing methods concurrently:
1. Pay-per-click (PPC) Advertising. This is a form of SEM where you pay to be ranked for certain keywords. Advertisers (usually internet marketers) pay for listings in search engines (Yahoo, Google and others). Search engines display ads in various spots in their listings as well as on websites based on the prices they receive. Google Adsense is the most well-known and successful PPC program on the internet.
2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO). There are a lot of strategies that are used together for SEO. This includes inserting strategic keywords to websites often after carefully studying those used by their competitors, in an effort to increase their own rankings and site traffic. It also includes getting inbound links using any number of methods that can be used for obtaining backlinks. And using meta tags and title tags effectively. SEO is a whole internet marketing strategy in itself that takes a lot of time to learn and implement. SEO techniques are constantly changing and internet marketers have to always be learning to stay on top of the strategies.
3. Paid Inclusions. For advertisers, it often pays to be a part of marketing or shopping search engines, such as BixRate, Froogle, Shopzilla, MySimon, DealTime, and many others. It helps them to lure shoppers to their own websites for other purchases and customer lists.
In the current high-tech marketplace, entire organizations exist to provide internet marketing consulting, web developing, SEO and SEM solutions. Larger companies often have their own in-house staff to handle and implement internet marketing strategies. One of the main objectives is to create search engine friendly websites that attract large amounts of traffic and appeal to their target markets.
