Best Practices in Search Engine Marketing

Best Practices in Search Engine Marketing

Search engine marketing (SEM) can be a powerful lead generation source, or a complete waste of money. B2B marketers often get less out of their SEM programs than possible by overlooking basic but critical steps. Here are some best practices to optimize your results from SEM campaigns:

1. Determine your budget: while there is no hard-and-fast rule for this, there are a number of factors that will affect the size of the budget required to optimize your return from search marketing:

Number of keywords—more keywords means a higher budget.
Time-of-day and days-of-week display—running a campaign 24/7 will require a higher budget than a business-hours-only campaign.
Geographic display—a global campaign needs a higher budget than one limited to one or a few countries.
Search-only or search plus content sites—running a campaign across both search engines and partner content sites requires a higher budget than a campaign focused on search alone.
The type of product or service you offer—as a general rule, products or services that are inexpensive, have only one decision-maker, and are either tactical (B2B) or impulse (B2C) purchases will benefit most from an aggressive search marketing campaign. Those that are big ticket, involve multiple decision makers, and are strategic (B2B) or infrequently purchased (B2C) benefit less from SEM campaigns, although there are always exceptions: for these types of offerings, the best approach is to start with a modest campaign and carefully track results to determine if more aggressive spending is justified.
Your goals—how many leads or sales are you planning to drive from search marketing? Higher goals require a larger budget.

2. Keyword / Key Phrase Development: look at multiple sources—your existing site content, competitors’ websites, industry trade publications, relevant blogs, and the keyword suggestion tool in Google AdWords—to develop your long list of key word and phrases to use in your SEM campaign. You can afford to go a little overboard here, as you only pay for actual clicks. Key words and phrases that get few impressions or a low conversion rate can be culled later.

3. Divide your keywords / phrases into logical groups. Keep the number of groups manageable, but ideally you’ll end up with 30 or fewer keyword search terms per group—60 terms as an absolute maximum.

4. Write your ads. Both Google and Yahoo frown on the use of shorthand (such as “GR8” for “great”), excessive punctuation (FREE!!!) and superlatives ("best," "leader," etc.). So, keep your verbiage humble—but compelling. For example, “the affordable option” or the most specific functional benefit you can factually tout.

For headlines, you’ll increase your click-through rate by using variable headlines, where the term the searcher actually used appears as the title of your ad. The syntax for this, on both Google and Yahoo, is {KeyWord: your service} where “keyword” is the term your prospect actually searched on, and “your service” is the default term to use in the ad if the search phrase is too long to serve as an ad headline.

5. Set your campaign parameters—geography, time/day and search/content. Both Google and Yahoo provide campaign settings pages where you specify these various parameters for your campaign.

First, determine your geographic coverage: do you want your ads displayed to a global audience, or just one or a few countries?

Second, set the time and day criteria for your ad display. For global campaigns, time needs to be set for 24-hour display. For localized campaigns, you may want to limit display hours, but set your ranges broadly—few people work 8-5 anymore, and both B2B and B2C prospects may well be searching in the early morning or late evening hours.

Third, decide if you want your ads to display only on the search engines or across their content partner networks as well (this website is an example of a Google content partner—notice the relevant ads displayed on the right side of this page). Content partner sites tend to deliver lower click-through rates than search, but can still be a valuable part of your campaign. For aggressive campaigns, content sites should definitely be included; for more limited or test campaigns, search alone may be the better setting. If you’re uncertain, start your campaign with both search and content; you can always change these settings once you’ve run the campaign for a time and have results to analyze.

6. Develop your landing pages. Logically, you may want a different landing page for each key term group. It’s amazing how many Google and Yahoo ads simply send clickers to a site’s home page. Unless your home page is spectacularly well-designed, visitors will wonder, “What am I supposed to do now?” Best practice is to send them to landing page that explains why you are absolutely the best vendor on earth relative to the key term group they came from, and then give them a clear call to action ("contact us for more information;" "download our white paper;" etc.).

7. Consider an “incentive for response.” A commonly used item is a white paper; visitors are far more likely to sign up to download or receive something than to simply fill out a form to get “more information”—from experience, about 10 times more likely.

8. Implement conversion tracking. Both Google and Yahoo provide conversion tracking code for your landing pages and instructions on how to implement this. Ultimately, the goal of SEM is to produce either leads or sales, not just clicks, so conversion tracking is a critical component of your search marketing campaigns.

9. Launch your campaign and analyze the results. Neither Google nor Yahoo provide real-time statistics; there is a lag of several hours in their reporting, so it will take a few days to get a usable picture of what’s happening with your campaign. Analyze results weekly for at least the first six to eight weeks of your program. When analyzing results, look for both which keywords are generating the highest number of clicks as well as the highest conversion rate. Remember the 80/20 rule: 20% of your keywords are likely to generate 80% of your clicks. Start by focusing on improving your results for these high-value keywords, and optimize on less-frequently searched terms later.

10. Optimize your keyword bids. The top three ads displayed get the highest click-through rates (CTR), but are also the most expensive positions. The bottom two ads (positions 7 and 8) get the second-highest CTR. To optimize your budget, bid for the top three position on terms where you get the highest conversion rate (regardless of CTR). For terms with a high CTR but low conversion, bid for the bottom three first page spots (positions 6-8). It’s unlikely that you’ll have terms that generate a lot of clicks with no conversions, but if you do—drop these, they are just a waste of your money.

11. Test alternative ad copy. Write at least two different ads that point to the same landing page, then in Google AdWords and Yahoo Sponsored Search, turn on ad optimization so that your more effective ads are being shown more frequently. After 2-3 weeks, check performance; if one ad is clearly generating higher CTR than the other, delete the lower-performing ad and replace it with a new one to test.

12. Test alternative landing pages. Once your ads are optimized (i.e., you have two ads performing about equally well), point each to a different landing page. Test differing types of copy, amounts of copy, contact form / no contact form, and different offers. Test until you have one that clearly outperforms alternatives at converting visitors to leads.

13. Unless your goal is an immediate online sale, implement appropriate lead follow-up programs. “Warm” leads (someone who completes a “contact us for more information” form) can—and are likely expecting to—be followed up with a phone call from sales. “Cool” leads (e.g., visitors who download a white paper) should be followed up with by email, with phone calls to those who haven't opted out of your messages after two mailings.

14. Finally, optimize your site for natural search based on your ad search terms that generate the highest number of impressions and best conversion rate. Organic search listings typically generate 3-4 times as many clicks as paid ads, so it’s critical whenever possible to have your website rank highly in natural search results for popular ad terms.

Related pages:

Higher level:

How to Develop a Web Marketing Plan

Guide to Web-Based B2B Lead Generation Programs

Peer pages:

Search Engine Optimization Basics

How to Write Effective Email Newsletters

Why Write a Blog for Business?

How to Create an Effective Business Blog

Best Practices in Blog Marketing

Interactive PR

Overview of Webcasting and Podcasting