Want to get more traffic and increase your brand awareness? SEM could be the solution! SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing and is the art of, through paying for it, making a website appear higher in the search results of search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo.
We talked to Johan, a SEM expert, who shared his top 5 tips for a successful campaign:
Have well-defined visions and goals
Define what you think is important and what you want to get out of your campaign. Is it quantity of clicks, traffic that results in engagement or is the goal to increase your brand awareness? Whatever goal you are aiming for, be sure to pursue your vision and follow the metrics that are relevant.
Give extra thought to: Is it important to have many clicks if few people clicking on the ad convert/consume in the end? Usually not, therefore it is important that you define the campaign’s goals and target audience even before you start setting up the campaign.
Conduct a keyword analysis
Once you have defined your target audience, you should investigate and analyse the potential customer’s online search behaviour, which can be done with a keyword analysis, also called keyword analysis. Google has a tool for this – Google Keyword planner. It can be used to see how many people are searching for one or more keywords, and during which parts of the year selected search terms are searched for the most. It is thus an optimal tool for evaluating the potential of different keywords based on the amount of traffic they generate.
Tip: The tool also helps you find related keywords, which are also worth appearing for. For example, if my keyword is communications agency, it can be varied by: communication website, communication news, best communication agency, communication Stockholm. Related keywords can be found by looking at the keyword ideas section.
Reflect on “negative keywords”
If your keyword is broad, you should try to keep track of the actual reference keywords that trigger your ads. It’s about getting a more accurate match and removing unwanted traffic that you’re unnecessarily paying for. By adding negative keywords, i.e. keywords that you don’t want to trigger your ad, you ensure that your ad only appears in the most relevant searches. It can sometimes be difficult to know in advance which keywords are triggering your ads unnecessarily. Therefore, the list of negative keywords is something that you update continuously during your campaigns.
For example, if you have a broad keyword like communication, you may not want your ad to appear if someone searches for “communication agency” or “communication tips”. Then “agency” and “tips” are your negative keywords.
Reflect on publishing time
You can set the time of the day when you want your ads to appear, as well as adjust the percentage of your budget for a particular part of the day. If you have a smaller budget to work with, this can be an effective way to save some extra cash. This is best done if you know what time of day your customers are more likely to search for what you offer. That way, you get the most out of your budget during your designated time window and spend less budget at the times that are less likely to bring you business.
Think about it: Pretty much all businesses have windows of time where people are more likely to do business. For example, people looking for dinner restaurants may be looking between 15:00 – 18:00. Most of the time, people browse the internet for things not related to their work before, after or around lunchtime during a normal working day.
Test and review!
Last but certainly not least, review your ad results consistently and continuously. To make the most money from your ads, you need to keep reviewing the results and making adjustments/improvements such as adding keywords discovered from the actual search queries, adding negative keywords and raising or lowering bids. If you don’t, you’re heading for your biggest search engine marketing mistake!
An extra tip: Remember to take lessons from SEM when working on SEO. If a paid ad performs particularly well, SEO can take inspiration and use the texts in the optimisation with the aim of increasing the number of clicks.
Now you have some simple tips to get you started with SEM. Venturing into the world of search engine marketing can be intimidating at first, but once you get the hang of it, you may be surprised at how much it can bring, even on a small budget.
If you need help getting started, we’re here. Our staff are experts in SEO/SEM and are happy to help you get your brand visible in the Google jungle. Contact us at:
