The Clickable Search Engine Marketing Blog

“Can I get more value out of search engine marketing than traffic?” 

Yes! In this post I will demonstrate how search engine marketing can be the best magnifying glass your company can invest in. 

Search Engine Marketing - or SEM - is still a rarity in advertising for its ability to market to people only when they are looking for your product or service. It is potentially the easiest sell you will ever make. I have heard this argument time and time again, and every time it holds water. Search ads appear at a critical point in a sale when a customer is actively looking for your product or service. It is an opportunity to understand what language is an effective elevator pitch for your product (the text ad itself). By carefully assessing the words used in your 95 character ad, you can discover what the greatest selling points of your product are. You can find the hook for what differentiates you from your competition. Taking the time to get creative writers and sales people in your company together to review your company’s text ads, and looking at the ads' clickthrough rates can be eye opening for your team. 

Landing Pages
The landing page is your gateway to the exciting world of search engine optimization (SEO). The on-page optimization tactics used to improve your Quality Score on landing pages (see Hanny’s & Tony’s recent articles about Quality Score and SEO) are the same tactics used by Search Engine Optimization Experts to improve organic (free) rankings. The underlying difference between Quality Score and Page Rank comes down to links to the page. The more links you have (from high quality sources) the higher you will rank organically. But, before you begin working on generating links to a page to increase its’ page rank, take the time and run an SEM campaign to that page and get your Quality Score up, and make sure the page converts at a rate you are happy with. Again, this is an exercise which is best done by more than just the marketing team at your company. Get other stakeholders involved. If you have a PR specialist, or a great sales team, leverage them. Get your designers and marketers in the room with them. Look at the metrics and content of your landing pages. You might be surprised what your team will take away, and the new tactics you can leverage. 

Conversion Paths
The last topic I want to cover is conversion paths. Conversion paths are the routes your users take to complete a goal. The goal your company defines. It may be a sale, it may be an email capture, it may be a video viewing. The goal isn’t the most important part of the exercise. Understanding how users get to that goal is. Look at your users who did convert, and then look at the path they took to get there. In Google Analytics you can look at the navigation summaries, and Omniture’s Site Catalyst has pathing functionality (if you don’t have this feature turned on, call your account rep!) that lets you understand the information and messages which a user interacts with before making a purchase. Look for opportunities to shorten that path by combining pages, or limiting the workflow of forms. The easier it is for a user to give you their information, and the more comfortable they are with giving it the higher your conversion rates will be. 

The data search engine marketers have access to is some of the most granular information you can get about your customers. Search engine marketing can help you understand your customers at a new level. Find out what pain points prevent your users from converting. Get your team involved. Get more out of your SEM dollars then just traffic.

Trace Johnson, Clickable SEM Guru

Note: Clickable employees volunteer several hours a week to helping other search marketers succeed. "Clickable Gurus" participate in numerous online search communities to provide straightforward answers to numerous questions, and, each week, one of the gurus posts a search marketing tip to the Clickable Blog.

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