SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization” and that’s precisely what it is. It’s the process of sprucing up your site so that when those individuals unaware of your services make a search, you show up in an ideal position.
People who find you on their own accord are called “Organic Traffic” and they’re one of the most lucrative types of audiences you can attract to your site. They also save you the most time.
Instead of finding the customers yourself, let the customers find you. That’s the premise of SEO. It makes sure that your content and your customers searches are matched and improves your ability to make those sales. There are a lot of techniques to improve SEO such as meta-tagging, link building, content refinement, and an incredible many more. You need to find out what keywords are key to your company and use an array of those techniques to put you in a better position than your competitors (i.e. higher in the search ranks). That leads to considerably more conversions.
Let’s say you have an online language learning system. Your primary goal is to get more signups, but your traffic is low despite the fact that you have an incredibly high-demand product.
You do a search for “Japanese learning software” and sure enough, your site doesn’t even come up until the 6th page while your competitors, with considerably lesser quality products, are right there in front. That means your search engine performance is poor.
Here’s what you need to do:
That just glazes the surface, but lays out the key components of building your site’s visibility. We’re happy to come and talk to you about it more and help you plan and get on the right track. Best of all, we won’t try to sell you!
Search Engine Marketing or SEM (also called Pay Per Click Advertising) is a form of paid advertising that caters completely to your budget and can put a huge boost on your incoming traffic while introducing your product or service to new potential customers.
What SEM does is allow you to choose keywords that your prospects are likely to search for in a search engine (like Google or Yahoo!). Then, you develop an ad that appeals to those searches to help pull traffic into your site. When a user searches for those keywords, your ad appears there right next to the search results.
Your ad placement (above or below your competitors) is a combination of your ad quality/relativity to the user plus the price you’ll pay. Essentially, the better quality ad, the less money you have to pay for it—though it’s actually much more advanced than that.
For considerably more ROI and tangibility than traditional ways of advertising, SEM allows you to pay for either clicks (that link over to your website for example) to increase conversions or impressions to improve brand awareness (the number of views on the ad). You can also make visual ads to be featured on site homepages and do retargeting, which puts that same visual ad in front of a user who already visited your site previously—for even more efficient customer conversion.
Put your product/service in front of ONLY those looking for it and your chances of success are exponentially better. That’s what SEM does. Many types of advertising get you plenty of exposure, but when only a minor number of those people who see your advertisement are actively looking for your service, it’s less effective.
You can target ads not only based on keywords, but also to a specific location, a time of day, device, and even put in negative keywords for searches that aren’t relevant. The more “focused” and targeted your ad is, the more likely you’ll only get clicks by those truly interested in what you have to offer. That means you can make the sale more efficiently and save money all the while.
Considering SEM is the new standard in digital advertising, your competition may or may not be already doing it. As time goes on you could be losing customers that may have otherwise chosen your services over theirs—had they found your ad and website first.
There’s finally a way to clearly see EXACTLY how well your dollars/yen are doing. Because everything is tracked and monitored it’s easy to whittle away useless ad spend and beef up areas that work. Constant monitoring and adjusting will show gradual improvements over the course of your account and shed light on new advertising opportunities.
It’s also flexible to your budget. If you don’t want to invest a lot in it, you don’t have to. You can decide exactly how much you spend each day or month.
For the record, we recommend a minimum ad spend of around $3,500 a month in order to get actionable data (enough information to make educated changes to settings/targeting/a-b testing) and to cover regular maintenance and tweaking, but you can get started for less.
We’ll come over and give you an introduction for free to help you plan…and we will ask for absolutely nothing in return.