Avoid Crisis! Spend your Marketing Dollars to Create a Sound Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Strategy

A company once spent a great deal of money promoting a new product. They pumped it on radio, TV, even on their own website. However, they didn’t have a sound search engine marketing (SEM) strategy. In fact, they didn’t have a SEM strategy at all. The results of this promotion? When consumers went to Google or Yahoo and did a search for the product, the product’s webpage didn’t even come up on the first page of results, but some “imposter” sites sure did.

Not convinced that you need SEM? A recent article on http://www.adage.com/ by Matt Creamer states that a very popular company had a similar situation, but the top “imposter” sites produced by search engines actually took the consumer to porn websites.

Ok, so now you’re probably thinking that maybe SEM is something to look into, but what is it? Search engine marketing is the process of incorporating search engine optimization into a company’s marketing strategy. Search engine optimization, commonly referred to as SEO basically means creating ways that search engines such as Google and Yahoo will pick up your website in an organic search (not a paid search) and that you’re link will be at the top of the search results.

There are three ways to optimize so that the search engines will pick up your links:

1. Choose keywords that consumers use when searching for your site or services and strategically place them on the pages of your website. There is actually an art to this as you don’t want to sound repetitive in your text.
2. Make sure that your site is navigable and has page titles that clearly state the information to be presented on the page. Sites that are confusing to navigate have a harder time being picked up by search engines. It is also a good idea to include a site map.
3. Use outside sources with content containing links to your site. Blogs, press releases, and social- media networks like Tweeter, and Squidoo, and directory listings on Yahoo Directory, Business.com, AllBusiness.com, and thomasnet.com. Adding links to your site on these popular sites will, in turn, help your site to become more popular.

SEM is very important, and it is much easier to plan from the beginning than it is to attempt to salvage your site once you’ve gone into crisis mode like the companies stated previously. You can’t just hope that your site will be optimized if you’ve made no effort to do so. When you have decided to promote a certain product or service of your company, before you do much else, talk with your marketing team or agency about how to optimize your site for that particular product or service, so when your consumers go to search engines to find your site, they actually find you and not an “imposter” you.