Clarus Consulting - Minneapolis, MN
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is Dead … Long Live Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
SEO has changed significantly in the last few years, driven entirely by the increased sophistication of search engines like Google, Yahoo, and others. There was time when ethically-questionable tactics worked: hiding keyword-text on your site, paying for links from “link-farms” or other websites not related to your industry, linking your site out to other prominent sites, and many more. Today, strategies like these will do nothing but hurt you.
Content is KING - Focus on Delivering Customer Value!
There are three ways to win with SEM, all involving high quality, customer-centric website keywords and keyword-combinations:
- Short Term SEM Win > Higher Online-Advertising ROI (Google AdWords, Yahoo, etc.)
- Drive down advertising costs and increase paid-search traffic by increasing your Google Quality Score (this is really important). Create product or service specific website pages dense with targeted keywords and keyword-combinations (but don’t over-do it, read on).
- Short Term SEM Win > Increase Customer-Satisfaction with Customer-Centric SEM
- Customer-Centric SEM means creating website text customers will value. While creating your value-based text use as many targeted keywords and keyword-combinations as you can, but keep it readable!
- Long Term SEM Win > Higher Natural / Organic (Free) Search Engine Ranking
- Over time (months or years) your efforts to create high quality customer-centric text using targeted keywords and keyword-combinations will pay off. Google and other search engines use a measure of “trust” to evaluate your website and compared it to your competitors. Search engines will only send you more traffic when they “believe” your site has higher value content for the person performing the search. If you need short-term results you should consider the ROI of Paid Search Advertising with Google AdWords or Yahoo.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Checklist:
- Research your website and your competitor’s website for potential keywords and keyword-combinations specific to a product or service
- Determine what products and service need their own website pages (don’t put unrelated products or services together on the same page)
- Create a list of customer-value based keywords and keyword-combinations for each product or service page
- Write new website text or rewrite existing text to include product/service-related keywords and keyword-combinations.
- Link keywords and combinations from sub-pages to the most relevant page for that specific product or service (this keeps the search engine from getting confused about which page is most relevant to a keyword or combination)
- Use bold and italics to tell customers what information is most important (some people believe this helps SEM and some people don’t, in either case it helps your customers)
- Develop meta-tags for each website page and insert them into your site: Title, Description, Keywords. Again, some people believe this helps SEM and some people don’t, either way there are advantage for your customers.
- Meta-titles show up at the top of the browser while customers are on your site and are used when customers bookmark a page.
- Meta-descriptions can show up in organic/natural-search results and may be the only thing customers use to decide if they should click your result or your competitors.
- Review your work and implement live
- Sit back and enjoy your customer-centric website, higher Google Quality score, lower advertising costs, and increase website traffic!
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