Web Marketing Strategy Update

There’s a serious flaw in many people’s approach to SEM (Search Engine Marketing). It’s simply that they tend to change their tactics too often – sometimes even replacing tactics that work with ones that don’t.

Search engine marketing focuses on the monetization of an online business or website. As long as making money is the goal, the business should survive. However, if the goal becomes getting or having the newest and latest gadgets on your website or blog, the likelihood of success diminishes…significantly.

Let’s take a look at what you should be doing…

Refine, don’t Replace

This is why it is imperative for you to find tactics that work and then refine them to perform even better. By using metrics on your traffic and sales, you can tweak your tactics until you see more and more of both.

Developing your online strategies, nurturing them, cultivating them to maximum effect will generate much greater return than chasing after the latest shiny object. Give your strategies time to take root and then harvest the crop. If you plow the field too soon, you simply throw out all of the work you’ve done to date.

Write it Down, then Measure

Always write your strategy down. Having a strategy in place that is actually written down will enable you to stick with it and stay focused on what you need to do each day and each week.

Create realistic goals to measure yourself and your site against. If you are making decisions based on what you think is working, rather than real data, you’re just itching to make a bad decision. Records need to be kept, so that you can quickly see ferret out the bad and nurture the good.

Brush up on the Basics

When equipping your website for better performance, read all you can about the basics first, such as basic SEO and keyword usage. Avoid being taken in by the promises of blackhat shortcuts and get rich quick schemes. They are only going to keep you from doing what you you will have to do eventually – cover the basics. Get your website or blog up to par with basic SEO and “good business” principals, then deploy more sophisticated SEO tactics (see the Learn SEO optimization guide).

Develop a sound search engine marketing strategy, using proven methods. Avoid taking half-hearted stabs into the dark. Develop a usable plan that you can and will follow. Only change it if you are sure that it can be improved or if you are convinced that you need to make some alterations. Know what you are doing, and why, and then you won’t have to try something else that isn’t going to work.

Don’t Ignore Social Media

Be sure to add an element of social marketing into your SEM strategy. Using blogs and media such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, etc., which already have an incredible amount of traffic, will enable you to tap into that audience and direct them to your site. Be careful about misusing this media though, as word travels fast. Genuine contributions will enable you to turn this potential pitfall into a benefit.

Freshen-up a Bit

If your content has been sitting on your website or blog for a while, you might consider updating it for better SEM results. Tweaking it for better keywords, adding a little more content to it, making it localized, or simply rewriting it, can bring in a fresh flood of traffic. It can also give you better page rankings, too.

Every now and then, you will read of someone who hit the online jackpot. Be careful about using their tactics. Chances are that you are only seeing a part of what they did and not the whole picture – making it basically irreproducible. Good SEM marketing will keep you going and making a profit if you do it right.

Jonathan Martin not only operates as an exceptional Magento developer, but also provides top-quality SEM consulting to his clients.