Web Marketing Strategy Update

Keyword research is the first, and most important step in search marketing.

You can probably see why keyword selection would logically be the first task. But why most important?

Because if you choose the wrong keywords, everything else you do to improve your search engine rankings is wasted effort.

Or to be blunt: If you target the wrong keywords, you will not make money.

When you create a new website or web page, you want to focus the content on popular keyword phrases relevant to your subject matter. These are the keywords that people in your target market regularly type into search engines to locate information on the products or services you provide.

But it’s often the case that many of your first choice keyword searches will be very competitive, making it difficult — if not impossible — for you to get your pages to rank highly for them unless you employ an SEO expert.

What you need to do is find other, less popular keywords that are also quite heavily searched, yet are easier to rank well for because there are fewer competing pages in the search results (this also applies to Adsense keywords and other PPC’s, but in terms of paying less for your clicks because there are less competing ads).

MarketingSherpa has released their 2nd Annual Search Marketing Benchmark report. 3,271 search marketers provided real-life results data for the survey, making it the biggest SEM study respondent base ever.

The new report includes:

• New stats on clicks, costs, conversions (and fraud)
• Which SEM tests work and which don’t
• Differences between agency-side vs in-house SEM results (Should you hire an agency or do it yourself?)
• How much marketers are budgeting for SEM for 2006 (breaks out b-to-b vs b-to-c)

Some excerpts:

Only 34% of 3,007 active search marketers that MarketingSherpa surveyed in July 2004 said their PPC ad results were “very good.” 13 months later, 43% of 3,271 surveyed MarketingSherpa readers said PPC ad results were “very effective” — a nine-point jump.

Search optimization (SEO) campaign satisfaction didn’t fare nearly as well. Last year 31% of surveyed marketers said SEO results were very good. This year 33% say SEO is very effective. It’s a gain, but only two points.

Even then, SEO came out far ahead of non-search tactics such as email marketing (25% “very effective” rate) and affiliate marketing (22% “very effective” rate).