What Every Small Business Needs to Understand Before Investing in SEM

Visibility is critical to achieving success on the web. It’s simple: When consumers can’t find you, they can’t give you their business.

But it isn’t always enough to land on the first page of organic search results. You have to ensure that your site truly outperforms every other available site. You might have the perfect relevant keywords that place you high in search results, but without quality, those keywords might end up hurting you.

To improve visibility, maintain quality, and drive traffic to their websites, companies often turn to search engine marketing. But when reaching for high-level goals, it’s important to first understand the parameters that tell the story of customers’ behavior on your website and determine whether SEM is the best strategy to help you achieve those goals.

The 5 parameters of pirate metrics

“Pirate metrics” — you know, AARRR! — track five key parameters that give you a better understanding of customers’ behavior on your website to help you target and attract similar ones.

• Acquisition: new and unique users visiting your website

• Activation: new visitors converted to customers with a purchase

• Retention: past customers returning and continuing to purchase

• Referral: past customers getting new visitors to frequent your website

• Revenue: total customers paying for your products or services

Although SEM campaigns can affect all five metrics, they primarily focus on just two of them: acquisition and retention. In other words, they attract new customers and reengage existing ones.

SEM vendors use four basic strategies to do this:

• Keyword analysis identifies the best search queries for your products or services and then matches them with the pages on your site. Some vendors use crawlers to determine gaps in your current keyword choices, while others use past search traffic as indicators for new words to target. Whichever method they use, knowing the words consumers use to search for products or services like yours can send higher-quality traffic to your site.

• Backlink creation is the primary tool of the so-called “black hat” SEO specialists. It requires more effort, but many ethical SEM vendors network with high-quality websites to establish links back to your site. In turn, these links tell search engines that your site contains useful or relevant content. Unfortunately, Google doesn’t appreciate actively recruiting backlinks, even from reputable sites, but you can still boost your ranking by ensuring your contact information is updated on Google+, Yelp, and Google Places.

• Targeted content allows vendors to act as content providers, supplying you with on-site content specific to your products or services and the consumers most likely to use them. The goal is to anchor visitors to your site. The better you can satisfy a consumer’s query, the more likely he is to stay.

• Bid management just means adjusting the parameters of your pay-per-click campaigns in a way that optimizes for the traffic and visitors you want to attract. As with any marketing effort, you want to get the best value for your money. This strategy goes after the exact customers you want, whether you’re focusing on acquisition or retention.

How to choose SEM services

For a small business looking to attract new customers, a paid campaign may be the way to go, especially if you’re selling products or offering services already common in search queries. Just make sure you enlist the help of an SEM vendor who can provide highly relevant keywords.

For retention, other SEM strategies can provide better results. Targeted content, for example, gives customers the information they’re looking for and keeps them coming back to your site. Keyword analysis, on the other hand, can provide you with the best match for new keywords as you rotate your inventory.

Whether you’re looking to improve sales, generate leads, or increase website traffic, an SEM campaign can help. But the ultimate goal of search engine marketing is visibility; you want consumers to be able to find you. And if you’re confident your search engine rankings don’t reflect your true place in the market, SEM strategies can help you work your way to the top.