Janet Lee Johnson | The Art of Marketing

I found a new search engine marketing web site, called SEM Basics. It’s a great site that will take you through a ton of tutorials in order to teach yourself more about SEM. One of my favorite (and mysterious) SEM subjects is how to select the right keywords to both:

• Optimize your web site so the search engine spiders will find you, and
• Figure out which search phrases to purchase in a smart PPC program

So on the SEM Basics site, they give you a whole bunch of “Best Keyword Selection Tools,” which is especially helpful.

Granted: tools laid out nicely in one place is fantastic; but the value is in the wrapper materials, so take some time to put yourself through the tutorials.

Even if you have an SEM agency with whom you’re working, you owe it to yourself and your organization to be extremely smart about how you increase your ‘find-ability’ online.

Imagine being able to talk the technical talk with your agencies! You’ll get more out of them, guaranteed.

One of my clients, SnapNames, is in the beginning of a Pay Per Click (PPC) program test cycle. We’ve worked with a Search Engine Marketing (SEM) firm out of Chicago called IMI.

IMI always recommends starting slowly on a PPC program to test the best phrases without paying too much for them. And wow. Are they right! We started testing in mid-December for SnapNames.

In three short weeks, I’ve consistently seen something amazing: dropping an ’s’ from a typical two word phrase (for example: “domain names“) had remarkable results.

The first line shows results for the phrase without the “s” - e.g. domain name, and the second line shows results for the phrase with the “s” - e.g. domain names.

I should note, that SnapNames defined a conversion (Conv.) as a person who not only clicks through on the ad (CTR) but creates a search for a domain name on SnapNames’ site. So there can be many more ‘conversions’ than ‘clicks.‘ In this case, we see the effect of that phenomenon.

The phrase without the ’s’:

• Cost Per Click for the phrase without the ’s’ was half the price of the ad with ’s’
• Conversions were higher, at only 15% of the total ad spend
• Because there were fewer searches for the phrase without the ’s,’ this more esoteric search term yielded a Cost Per Action (CPA) rate of only 10% of the CPA of phrase with the ’s’

The point is, if you’re really serious about SEM, be prepared to test, test, test. Because the results of your testing can save you a lot of money in the short and longer term.

I just got a copy of Marketing Sherpa’s new “Wisdom” PDF, which has six pages of Search Engine Marketing tips (p.26-32), written by marketers in all sizes of companies. Many of them are excellent, including simple tips and tricks to increase the performance of your SEM efforts.

Simple things like switching your landing pages for PPC ads to product pages (get them right to the information they’re looking for) and exposing pricing in ads (get them information up front) have significantly increased results for two wise marketers.

Grab the report. There are also sections on email, social networking, general marketing and b2b marketing as well.

Advertising Age published a fact-filled Search Marketing whitepaper last week. It is outstanding. I’m into search marketing these days in a big way, especially in my work for SnapNames (we’re seeing the results of some early keyword purchases here that are pretty interesting)… and have uncovered some excellent new angles on search that are yet to be tapped by the masses.

The whole SEM (Search Engine Marketing) arena is crazy and can be confusing, especially to those businesses who don’t have the money to invest in a search engine marketing strategy, implemented by someone else.

If you want to start understanding search, a great first step will be to download the Ad Age whitepaper.

I plan to spend the month of January focused on search, and improving a company’s ‘find-ability’ online. So a great second step will be to watch this space for more.