Paid search marketing (SEM) should be an integral part of every marketing campaign. It attracts prospects faster, achieves high ROI, and enables testing.
You may have heard about or read the many discussions of SEM vs. SEO. That's a misleading topic. SEO paid search and search engine optimization (aka organic search) offer pros and cons and complement each other.
Search engine marketing differs from or organic search in that it's paid advertising. Organic search generates lots of traffic, but it's not all encompassing. That's where SEO paid search or pay per click (PPC) advertising comes into play.
Let's look at the pros and the cons of employing search engine marketing.
Advantages of Search Engine Marketing
· Attracts Prospects Faster - Paid search marketing is as fast as search. Its immediate. In addition, it doesn't take long to create and optimize PPC campaigns. Whether your goal is to generate quick traffic to boost your website's popularity, broadcast a newly published white paper, or announce your company's participation in a trade show, SEO paid search gets the job done - fast.
· Achieves a High ROI - Your boss will love this one. Because it doesn't take more than one person to write pay per click banners, SEO paid search is inexpensive to implement. Besides this, PPC banners produce a high-level of clicks. According to research by Wordstream, SEO paid search generates 89% of traffic outside of organic reach.
· Targets Prospects Efficiently - With proper paid search management, you can target customers by geography (local, regional, national), by time (week days, weekends), and by platform (PC, laptops, tablets, mobile). Google provides these features in a recent upgrade to AdWords called Enhanced Campaigns. These changes allow marketers to adjust their settings to maximize the effect of all their pay per click banners.
· Enables Measurement to Improve Effectiveness - As pay per click banners grow excessively, standing out becomes more difficult. However, Google's Enhanced Campaigns offers improved measurement and reporting. It introduces more granular detail, down to the keyword level by device. Also, you can optimize PPC ad groups at the extension level: Sitelink, Call, App, and Offer. Previously, changing one extension reset your entire ad group data.
Disadvantages of Search Engine Marketing
· Difficult to Master - Writing pay per click banners appears deceptively simple. In reality, they're difficult to master. You must optimize PPC banner ads as well as write persuasive ads.
· Mitigation: Essentially, practice makes perfect. Including keyword-rich text, writing attention-grabbing headlines and testing often helps ease this task. Testing allows you to tweak and further optimize your PPC ads, selecting those with the highest click-throughs. Direct marketing techniques, supported by careful testing outperform. Don't try to be creative.
· Limits Textual Description - You're probably already aware PPC banners have limited space for your advertising copy. Specifically you have 135 characters to grab a prospect's attention and produce the desired response. You have 2 characters of text for your headline; 35 characters for your 2nd and 3rd lines each; and the rest for your URL.
· Mitigation: Being pithy is a must. Practice writing succinctly and persuasively. By that I mean writing both for the right brain as well as the left brain. Address emotions first and then logic. Howie Jacobsen recommends practicing by writing Haikus.
· Highlight Website Weaknesses - Once someone clicks on an optimized PPC ad, it should take your prospect to a landing page. Landing pages pay per click banners should look and feel alike. Unfamiliar looking landing pages make a prospect may feel lost resulting in a lost sale. Similarly, a weak call to action will cost you a converted prospect.
· Mitigation: You must write compelling, engaging and actionable copy.
All in all, search engine marketing extends your reach and compounds your results when combined with organic search. Clearly, SEO paid search has pros and cons. However, you can amply mitigate the disadvantages through careful paid search management.
Effective paid search marketing works quickly targets your prospects like a laser beam and does so affordably, even on a lean budget.
Work SEO paid search into your marketing mix, and you'll achieve measurable results that help you boost you're your profits sooner rather than later.
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