Simplifying Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

Simplifying Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

We recently let our very own Steve Crowe out of his cage to present at the digital marketing for marketers seminar hosted by the Creative People at Auckland University. As one of three speakers alongside Regan Hall and Cornelius Boertjens, Steve talked about search engine marketing as a whole and how that ties in with other common digital marketing themes.

The talk went for over an hour but 5 juicy snippets extracted from the talk and what your business should keep in mind for digital marketing in 2015 are as follows:

1. Get a health check:
   Ensure your website is technically sound, healthy and is positively meeting the bulk of Google’s ranking factors – especially important in recent times with regards to mobile responsiveness. This is a great place to start and build on your SEO strategy.
   

2. Measure stuff:
   Get a web analytics platform linked to your site to capture traffic behaviour. Google analytics is our preferred tool as it is a free and very comprehensive system. Be weary though as it is a bottomless pit of data and can be overwhelming.Sit down and think about what you want to measure on your website. Firstly consider what can be measured – are there contact forms, PDF downloads, videos etc. for users to engage with? If so it may pay to measure interactions with them. As a bonus tip you should ideally assign goal values to non-ecommerce based goals in order to measure their effective monetary contribution. This can be a bit of a guessing game but it is a relative scale so don’t get too caught up in it.

3. Link AdWords with Google Analytics:
   A simple step but one that is often overlooked. Ensure your AdWords data is being brought into Google Analytics if you are using these two platforms. This will offer valuable insight on how AdWords is performing relative to other traffic mediums and also can give good insight into cross medium interaction.

4. Compare apples with oranges:
   Time spent browsing the net on devices is increasing year on year. Make sure your website is providing a great user experience to users not only visiting from desktops but smartphones and tablets too. Each of these user types has different expectations and needs to give consideration. Keep in mind too that Google will soon also be penalising non-mobile friendly websites.

5. Produce the goods:
   A hot topic right now, but nevertheless important is generating attractive assets on your digital platform. Pique your users’ interests, get them involved, solve their problems, answer their questions. This may be through quality blogging, video, images, podcasts and more. Be imaginative and unique. This is quite a difficult step but an important one, especially as Google crawls your content and uses its findings in assigning your keyword rank in search results.

Search Experts Question Time

If you are keen to see your business’s digital results prosper but don’t know where to start, get in touch with the This Side Up team and we will sort you out!