The SEM Playbook

On this episode of 1000 Ways to Market Your Business, Samantha Scott, APR, is joined by Paige Johnson, Digital Operations Coordinator at Pushing the Envelope.

They delve into the world of Search Engine Marketing (SEM), discussing the fundamental differences between organic SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and paid, best practices for optimizing your website, conducting keyword research, and integrating organic and paid strategies for maximum impact.

Have a question or feedback to share? Visit www.getpushing.com or one of our many social media channels. We look forward to hearing from you.

#marketing #business #communication #strategy

Transcript

0:05

Hi, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of 1000 Ways to Market Your Business, a podcast brought to you by Pushing the Envelope. I am Samantha Scott, APR, and today I am joined by Paige Johnson, our Meta Certified Specialist. Today we are talking about SEM, that is search engine marketing, for those of you who don't know the lingo. We're going to try to make this a jargon free podcast. But we want to go over all things related to search engine marketing and how you can use that to grow your business. So, Paige, why don't you kind of give a high level, 30,000 foot view of what does that mean for those that might not be familiar. Sure. So in search engine marketing, we're ultimately talking about what our audience members or any individual browsing the web is typing into their search box and what is coming up both organically and paid. Which includes PPC and Google ads and Microsoft ads, Pinterest ads, as well as just SEO fundamentals of optimizing your website and your content to drive organically. And for those of you who don't know, SEO, compared to SEM, is search engine optimization, which is a core part of search engine marketing. So search engine optimization could be how you set up the back end of your site, so your H1 tags, the back information, alt tags, information on images, as well as other text on your website, to help you rank better in search. So if somebody is searching on Google for your business, your service, a product that you offer, you want to rank highly. So think of when you're searching for something, you probably look at the first one or two things on a page, you're not scrolling, you know, Google pages 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, you want to be right there at the top. So, let's talk about some best practices for search engine marketing. Where do you want to start? Let's start with SEO for organic. I think this is a really fundamental thing that a lot of marketers or companies miss the mark on, because it is something you don't really see when you open a site in front of your face, it's a lot of from the back end. That being said, it is rooted a lot in content and your content strategy and putting high quality content and data and information on your website that's rich in primary keywords and secondary keywords, so that you have a better chance of showing up in the search engine results page. So there's a couple ways to find the best keywords and a lot of great tools that you can use to find those, whether you're searching a page on your website and highlighting the ones that have a lower competition and a higher search volume, higher conversion rates, and you want to make sure that those are spread out organically throughout your website so that you're ranking when people are looking for something specific to the topic at hand. So I'll jump in there. For those of you who aren't super familiar with this, this is really technical. It can be kind of confusing if you're just stepping in. So, keywords are things that somebody might be searching for, and I always, always counsel clients, and I know Paige does too, that it may not necessarily be the terms that you use to search for a product or service. We all use different terms, phrases, approaches to searching for things. So it's really important to do that keyword research, and I think Paige is going to give you a couple of those resources and tools that you can use to find out what keywords or terms are ranking the highest or have the most eyeballs on it, because that's ultimately what you want. And to your point about this being on the back end, the majority of this is built into the content you put on your site. And often we may not be thinking about that when we're writing content. It's, okay, I'm Pushing the Envelope and this is what we do and my services, versus thinking about the keywords somebody might be using to find my business. But it's also in the back end, the structure of your site. If you are not responsible for that, that's okay, but you should be posing the question to your webmaster or your team about what are they doing to help with SEO, are they completing the H1 tags, the alt tags, and all that back end information to make sure that you have a really strong SEO plan. And you can always have plugins and things on your site too to help give you kind of a pulse on that if your site is set up really well for SEO or not. Right. And to that point, with it being deeply rooted in the quality and quantity of content you have, another best practice is to not have duplicate content. The way I like to think of it is that Google is searching through your website trying to figure out what you're talking about and who they can put it in front of. So when there's multiple pieces of content that say the same thing, it confuses the program and it doesn't know which to put out and then therefore you'll rank lower. So that's just a good practice, because when we say content, it's not over do all that you can. Right. It's quality, relevant, timely. Yeah, don't go to Chat and ask it to publish a hundred blogs for you that you can publish each week. That would not be good. But that also reminds me of something else that I see is, a lot of times, we work with prospects or clients who are coming from a very specific industry. Maybe it's legal or healthcare or something like that. And there are a number of companies out there that are doing copy and paste websites. And that can also hinder you because if it's copy and paste, not just duplicate content on your individual website, but it's duplicated content from a different website, well, that gets a thumbs down in the eyes of Google. It's not going to help you. So, making sure you've got somebody creating the content on your site that's custom, unique, but also keyword rich. Yeah. And how you're going to make that content and the density of the keywords should be planned around the search intent of your audience. So it's important to know your audience and what they're looking for, knowing their pain points when they're trying to find a specific product or service on your site. Again, this is different per industry. And being specific and using those words in places on the back end and up front; is it in the title, is it in the meta description? And again, to my point about Google trying to understand what your landing page or blog or case study is about, it can't read when it sees a photo of something. It doesn't really know what that is. So it goes back to alt text and more of that background information that you're giving to Google to show that you're an authentic and reliable brand. It also helps with readability for those who might be reading impaired, those types of things, if you have the alt text. So if a page doesn't load correctly or if they have visual problems, they're able to see what it is. So you could say this is a picture of Paige and Samantha, you know, so on and so forth. But yeah, it's really important thinking about that and the keywords and the content that you're putting on your site because it does matter when somebody is looking for a solution. And that's really, to me, the not technical side, but more of the marketing positioning side of what is the problem you're trying to solve? What's the benefit you can give to the end user? And communicating that, that's more important than the product or service. People don't really care how they get to the solution, they just want the solution. Right. Within the SEO elements and the keyword structure, the different places we want to look at it, there's a technical side and the strategy side. Ensuring that you know your audience and you're researching their pain point search intent, as well as knowing the technicalities behind alt text, the meta tags, headlines, descriptions, and the URL structure. And as I said before, there's a lot of great tools where you can copy and paste the URL that you have, and there's checkers for effectiveness and the likelihood to convert or to have somebody land on that based on all those different elements in the research that you do before you publish something. What are some of those websites? I know Google Ads has some of those resources. Yeah. Google Ads is a great one for checking for keywords on a website and the search volume competition level. SEMrush is great. And there's a bunch of ads keywords planners, WordStream is a free one. So there's a whole bunch of tools and they'll give you the same output. There's some premium or plus programs that you can get, but there's free ones that work really well. Awesome. So SEO is definitely a big part of search engine marketing, SEM. So what is another component? And this goes into kind of the paid world, I think. Yeah. This is also a process that involves a lot of keyword research and making sure that you're using the words that are going to have the best response and you're meeting your audience where they are at for what they're looking for. Within that, there's some technicalities with targeting and how you're going to match your keywords. I would say it's a little bit more technical because it has less of the creative element. It's just your ad copy and headline, whereas on your website you got images and videos and all these other different engaging elements that you want to optimize organically. So within PPC, it's equally as important to do your keyword research and understand what your audience is searching for. You don't want to be paying for clicks for search terms that aren't going to convert or be valuable for you. Just wasting money at that point. Exactly, so you might see a ton of impressions on a certain keyword, but is it really valuable traffic that you're driving with that ad. Yeah, are you getting the conversion? So impressions meaning exposure in terms of how many people were exposed to that particular ad and then conversions being how many of them actually took the desired action. So did they make the purchase? Did they make the reservation? Did they click to learn more, make an appointment, fill in the blank? And Paige referenced the term PPC, that's pay per click. So you're paying essentially per click. I can expose Paige to the ad on Google, but if she doesn't actually click on it, I don't have to pay anything. I pay when she actually clicks on it. And to your point, it is technical. You don't have the images or things to attract attention, but I think this just goes back to the core fundamental best practice of marketing, which is, you have the right audience and the right offer, it's gonna work. So, if you've targeted really, really well and you have the right keywords to reach those folks and you have the right offer or the right solution to their problem, it's going to perform. Right, and it is best practice, if you have the budget and capability and resources, to pair the organic with the paid, when your organic is working really well, your paid is going to reflect that because the PPC ad groups are built around directing a user to a landing page. The landing page needs to be full of call to actions. I'm sure someone watching has gone to a landing page, and it's like, this is not what I was looking for, right back out after two seconds. You should be directing your audience members to a page where they open it, and it's click here to call, for directions, make a reservation, it should be rich with CTAs, so that there's conversions happening from that paid click. And specific to the ad. Because you might be a restaurant that serves lunch and dinner and your ad is lunch specific. Don't take them to your homepage where they have to then hunt and peck to find that. Take them to the page that talks about lunch service. Or if you are a retail establishment and your ad is about women's wear versus men's wear or fill in the blank, make sure it's specific and you get people to the point where they can make the purchase or the desired action quickly and efficiently. Don't make them hunt and peck around. Please, please do not send people to your homepage. Like, just don't. You're wasting your time. If anything, you can make, like, additional landing pages. That's a good option for if you have multiple locations. And make ad groups and campaigns specific to that landing page. You can have one campaign that takes the audience member to multiple different locations in each ad group. But it's really a good idea to make sure that you are addressing the exact thing that they are searching at that time. Yes. That being said, there are times when your landing page might pop up when someone searches for something that's a little bit unrelated to what you want them to do. And so it's also a really good practice to continuously check at the search queries for your ad and add the terms that don't apply to your negative keywords list. So that next time somebody searches that, you will not pop up there again and you're not going to pay for that conversion or click. Right. That's the worst thing is like if something happens to come up and it's not what you want, but then you still have to pay for it. So yeah, maintaining a really quality negative keywords list is really, really important just to help you save money and make it strategic. The other point I would add is this kind of lends itself to, I would say, the best practice, running multiple campaigns simultaneously. And I understand if somebody's relatively new to this, that might sound really, really daunting and confusing, but it doesn't have to be. It's just meant to be really, really hyper targeted, and it gives you the ability to have really great control over who's seeing your content, making those campaigns really specific, which always perform better, and then manipulate your budget. So, the way that we run pay per click and any of our digital things is not a set it and forget it. We're monitoring in real time throughout the week, throughout the month, because if one campaign is just crushing it and the other one is not, we're gonna bail on that one and put all the money into the other one. Or if one needs a little more help. But it's monitoring those things and being able to make adjustments. So having multiple campaigns running simultaneously is really beneficial for your business. Especially if you have multiple product lines, services and or target audiences. Really important. Yeah, and thankfully within Google Analytics for your organic analytics and in Google Ads, there's really great reporting information and data that'll tell you a lot about your audience and how those specific keywords are working so you can continue to refine it and add new ones at any time. And just make sure you're finding your people when they are looking for you. I mean, it's definitely better to hone in on a more focused, more likely convertible audience than to do all the keywords, everything related, and get a bunch of people seeing your ad that aren't looking for your product or service that aren't going to serve your business. A great example, we worked with a remodeling company a number of years ago, and they serve Southwest Florida. When we came on, they had been working with a different company that had a fairly robust digital campaign running for them, and we got the data, and they were saying, oh, look, you know, our rep tells us that we got so many hundred thousands of impressions, et cetera, and it's really, really good. Okay, great. Well, how many of those people actually hired you to do the job? Well, they couldn't really track that, which should have been set up from the beginning. But secondarily, when you dug into the impressions, there were people in Idaho, Indiana, all over the place. These are not people that can actually hire this company to do the job. And therefore, that company was wasting money on these impressions. So yeah, absolutely. You've heard me. If you've listened to this podcast before, you've heard me say I am anti spray and pray. Yeah. But that is so often what companies do because they don't really know. They're like, well,"anybody," right, if I'm a restaurant,"anybody" could be my target audience. Okay, sure, anybody could go to your restaurant and buy food from you, but it's not really who you're trying to reach. So, try to be as specific as you can. Yes, I agree, and I think, understanding where your audience is going and what other PPC campaigns are performing, there's a lot of easy ways to just look at what competitors are doing. Google your search term and look at the sponsored links, and what is in the headlines? What's in the descriptions? What keywords are they using? And also on top of that, Google has a really cool feature that says, you know, people also ask, or you might also want to see, you can get some insight on what other things people are looking for. So are they asking questions about how you do something or where you find something or the easiest way to do something, whether it relates to your product or service, it gives you a lot of insight on search intent and activity in real time. So, look at what your competitors are doing. They have ads that are working and it's readily accessible. And they're looking at what you're doing. Yeah. It's all out there. Trust me. So yeah, I think we've touched a bit on data and tracking. Is there anything else that you want to add as it relates to SEO performance tracking, pay per click performance tracking, and any how to tips for people who might be interested in doing that for themselves? Yeah, I think for SEO, when you're trying to improve your rankings organically, you mentioned earlier there's some plugins and stuff which are great tools from your back end of your site, and I had mentioned some tools earlier that are both free and paid. Searching, just looking what's out there, look at industry best practices, industry benchmarks. How much are other advertisers paying for a click for PPC ads? What does your performance look like on the web page that you are optimizing year over year, month over month? And just, it's really, really important, I can't stress enough, the paid and organic, the audience members need to know what to do. We inherently have a short attention span, and so there needs to be plenty of direction of where to go, where to find us. And on that note, actually, that just reminded me, in your meta titles and descriptions, don't put your phone number on there, because then people can call you, or your email, or your contact, then they can call you without even visiting your site, and that's a conversion that's untrackable as it relates to data. So strong CTAs, call to action, call to action, sorry, monitor and adjust as needed. It's great within Google Ads specifically because you can add and adjust keywords at any time. You're not set once you start a campaign with, okay, here we go. You can adjust your target budget per day. And I think the best advice I can give is use both together and complement them and produce really high quality content that speaks to your audience. And continue to do it, right? So make the effort to plan it out and do it that initial time and monitor, but then continue to do that. Continue to create content and to watch and monitor. And if you need additional help, we have blogs and eBooks on this topic, but you could also try out Google's max performance campaigns as well. But I would tell you, don't do it as a set it and forget it kind of Band Aid, you know, make sure that you're learning and educating yourself, or if you realize like, hey, look, this is out of my depth and you need a partner, feel free to search out somebody that can help you with that. But we would love to answer any questions that you may have. Feel free to comment, share, tune in to our next episode of 1000 Ways to Market Your Business. I'm Samantha Scott. Thanks for joining.