subject: How to Leverage Search Engine Marketing [print this page] How to Leverage Search Engine Marketing How to Leverage Search Engine Marketing
If you're new to online marketing or if you haven't been overly happy with the results of your wbsite, you might find this article a little surprising, if not downright frustrating. Chances are that you own a traditionally off-line business and you may be finding that the traditional approaches to marketing don't really transfer all that well to the web.There is a reason for that and it is a simple one. Traditional advertising can best be described as interruption marketing. We were trying to push a message in front of a prospective customer when they were likely not ready for it. They may not have been ready for it from either or both a time and place perspective. Very rarely am I eating dinner and thinking that I really should get my gutters cleaned. So when that telemarketing call comes in, it isn't likely to be very successful.On the other hand, search marketing is quite the opposite. In this case, a prospective customer is actively searching for solutions to a specific problem and will be more than welcome to pay attention to any solutions he or she may come across. Seth Godin calls the latter "permission marketing" and the difference between the two approaches is night and day. When I sit down and pull up Google (something that I do probably 20 times per day) I already have a problem in mind that I'm looking to solve. Either that, or I'm simply looking for information about a specific topic. It could be absolutely anything but smart marketers know their market and know enough to target keywords (or search terms) that are most likely to convert to buyers.Using one of my niche ecommerce sites as an example, I'd much rather get 20 visitors per day searching for 'buy cat trees' than 200 visitors arriving through something like 'cat accessories'. Even though there is only a slight difference in the terms, the difference in results can be huge.Every industry has such buying terms and it is your job to figure out what they are and then target those terms. One way to do that is to see what your competitors are paying for different search terms on Adwords. Chances are pretty good that the more expensive a term is the more likely it is that it is a buying term.There are a number of tools on the Internet that allow you to find out what competitors are paying for different terms. Google's own keyword research tool is a great place to start. But whatever you do, turn off the interruption marketing and focus on getting prospective customers that would welcome speaking with you about whatever it is that you sell. Search marketing is a very good place to start this quest.
