NEW: Fred Schebesta

How to start a search engine marketing campaign.

Why start a search engine marketing campaign?

Buying traffic for the sake of buying traffic will send you broke. The reason is because it isn’t targeted, so you will only get people coming to your website that just leave. Buying just any traffic is like putting up a TV ad – you are shooting millions of arrows out to try and hit a prospect. The answer to not wasting your money is to target specific users and pre-qualify your traffic. 

Target specific users – Market to people who are interested in your product. Michael Kiely taught me to “fish where the fish are”. I took out of this that we should advertise where people are looking for our products.

Search engine marketing targets the people who are interested in your products because the visitor types in what they are searching for. The user makes their intentions clear that they are searching for “a way to save my marriage” (keyword typed in = “save marriage book”). Before the user goes to your website they tell you what products they want to see. If your product matches what they want to see you can easily market your product to them.

Pre-qualify your audience – Buying advertising on a performance basis is a great start, but you still don’t want to be paying for traffic that is not sent to your website for the right reason. Getting a user to do something like typing in a query makes the traffic more qualified. Users actually have to search for your ads.

Whenever I work with a client I recommend buying search engine marketing traffic as the first thing to do. The reason is that you can keep your budgets low, ($100 per month) and you can keep the campaign small and manageable to determine what results you get.

How to start your search engine marketing campaign to get instant traffic

Step 1: Choose your search engine. I recommend starting with Google because it accounts for around 70% of the Australian search engine market traffic. Yahoo and Ninemsn each account for around 12% each and the minor other search engines account for the remainder.

Below is a snapshot from one of my client’s websites that shows you the percentage of traffic they get from each of the search engines.

You can see from the above results that Google is the big gorilla in the Australian search space, so I always recommend you optimise first for it and buy Adwords first. After that consider Yahoo and Ninemsn.

Fred Schebesta’s company Freestyle Media is an established innovative online marketing agency specialising in building search engine friendly corporate websites and running online marketing campaigns.

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