Search Engine Marketing can be a mystery to most people who have been entrenched in more traditional business marketing strategies.
Many of the nuances of SEM are lost on small business owners and entrepreneurs, simply because in terms of advertising, this kind of thing has only recently really become a major player.
Just like Miley Cyrus...
Here are three other things, search engine marketing and Miley have in common.
1. No one is disputing their effectiveness
Miley is a money maker, no one is questioning that. So is landing number one on Google search results.
First page of results will guarantee you traffic. Second page makes you competitive. Beyond that? You need a new SEO strategy and to invest in some Pay Per Click ads.
Being acutely targeted in nature, effective SEM brings in your ideal customers, without blowing your marketing budget. You simply have to know what your market is searching for. Pay Per Click puts your offer in front of the eyes of your buyers--but you either have to research to know what they’re searching for, or have a strong intuitive sense about your target market.
Miley seems to excel in the latter (but who knows? Maybe she has some kind of wacky brilliant marketing team behind her). She understands what her ideal audience wants to or is ready to see, and has gotten really good at delivering the goods. Love her or hate her, that’s a business lesson to take to heart.
2. Is it art? Is it exploitation? It’s both.
Miley’s new videos walk a line between art, exploitation and expression. Sort of how Search Engine Optimization does with your web presence.
Sure, you want to provide useful, meaningful, and valuable content to your customers, but you also want Google to pick up on that. Striking a balance between writing for robots and writing for people can be tricky.
Thankfully, there are SEO tricks that you can use to boost your rankings without sacrificing your content. On-page optimization, will give your site more flexibility and rank your site higher in search results. It can be as simple as ensuring that your content is styled for search engine visibility, or as complicated as embedding specific keyword phrases and code into your copy.
3. Search Engine Marketing is here to stay.
So long as people are searching Google for any kind of information at all (and can you imagine a scenario where humanity would suddenly find search engines useless?), SEM is going to be a part of every successful business marketing toolbox.
How seriously you take SEM in your business will have an impact on your bottom line. As, thanks to the internet small and local businesses find themselves competing on a much grander scale.
So you might as well jump on board now, because like Miley, SEM is going to be on the scene for awhile.
