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Your planning phase for SEM (Search Engine Marketing)

Jun 9, 2014

Do you ever feel like your plans are organized, and then all of a sudden you seem to be going nowhere?

Try to figure out what your basic plan is. So by that I mean what is it that your online presence is set up for?

  • Are you organized to become a lead generation website?
  • Are you organized become the resource center?
  • Are you organized to sell products on your website?
  • Are you organized to make key performance indicators that will help you on the sales cycle of your product?

Lets make this fairly simple. If you have a product that you are selling and you want to sell more. Inherently, your SEM plan will be organized to sell more of that product. Let's say that prior to the plan implementation that you have sold 200 units per month. Then a plausible result set of your plan would be to increase your sales of that product by 25%. So your goal set is to sell a total of 250 units going forward from the implementation of your marketing plan.

Let's try another example. If your main focus of your site is to create leads so that your incredibly skilled sales team can follow up and create business for you, then your SEM plan should mirror that. Presently you have 100 leads per month and with the implementation of your SEM, you want to increase that by 30% to 130/month, then your focus will be to get traffic to the page where your lead ten area is.

If you are a resource centre for a product, then this can become a little more difficult to track. You then have to consider what keywords you are being found for, and what new keywords that you want to be found for are. If for example you want to be found for a popular term like "car parts" and your site has reference information for all  parts for import vehicles, then you need to focus on that key phrase and decide on at most a 40% increase over your present search traffic, and then mark your growth in comparison to past traffic months.

The Key here is to analyze what it is that you want to have as your goal and work back from it to decide upon your ultimate solution for your own SEM plan.

What are the steps?

  1. Use analytics to find your baseline
  2. Figure out what your business plan for your online presence is (see bullet points above)
  3. Create a matching SEM plan that will mirror your longterm outcome of your online presence
  4. Implement your plan
  5. Repeat steps 1-4

If you think that your business model is straightforward and doesn't need tweaking, I wish you all the success in the world, but I know that others will find their success from the lack of planning from some businesses.