Search Engine Marketing is the increasing of a website’s visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs). It can be divided into 2 groups;
- paid
- organic (free)
Both paid and organic searches have their place and are important to drive traffic to your website, however the most common form of trusted search results is organic. The art of increasing search results both paid and organic is known as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).
In recent years there has been a 72% increase in business and advertiser’s expenditure on Search Engine Marketing (SEM), with most jumping onto the tech-savvy train and capitalising on the enormous number of daily searches via computer, laptop, iPads /tablets and smartphone to promote their business.
Sadly, 1000’s of businesses and advertisers are still unaware of how to place adverts in the right place at the right time to maximise their organic reach and take advantage of the free opportunity.
The top SEM mistakes to avoid include:
- Non-Mobile Friendly Landing Pages
- Negative Keywords
- Themes and Pages Not Matching
- Unfriendly Page Navigation
Non-Mobile Friendly Landing Pages
The majority of searches are now carried out on smart phones and tablets, so your landing page or your home page needs to be mobile friendly.
Pages that don’t resize and are ‘too big’ or simply unsuitable for the phone/tablet screen will not only discourage viewers from viewing your site but they will probably enjoy your prospect to head over to your competitor. This type of pages will cause your customers to exit and return to the search results to visit another relevant page, something Google will recognise and push your page further down in the search results. Google also imposes penalties for sites that are not mobile user friendly so make this a priority when setting up your website.
Negative Keywords
Negative keywords are words you don’t want to pay for when you are running adwords campaigns. They are words that are very generic and don’t describe your services so your ad budget will be gobbled up with little or no result.
For example, “best carpenter” would be a negative keyword if there was a company called “John Best Carpentry” in your town.
Use a tool such as Google Keyword Planner to reduce your use of negative keywords; they are more common than you think and will lead to your ad not being shown in searches for a number of reasons. When you add a negative keyword to your ad campaign or group, the likelihood of your site being listed in a search containing that word is minimal.
Themes and Pages Not Matching
Your potential customer doesn’t like surprises. If your ad is a fluffy dog and they come to your landing page and it is stark and clinic your customer will bounce straight back out again because it wasn’t what they expected. Sounds simple, but you’d be surprised how many landing pages do not match their adverts. Your links need to correlate with your advertised product or service and all your content needs to be relevant to avoid frustrating potential customers and followers.
Unfriendly Page Navigation
We have all had those search results that don’t match our search question in anyway. There is nothing more frustrating than not being able to find what you are looking for on a website. Ensure you have a search function or have an easily navigated content database for your viewers to find what they are looking for quickly. Otherwise your traffic flicks back to the search results and Google algorithms take this as your site being irrelevant and unsuitable for the search, driving you down the search page and your website traffic will go in someone else’s direction.
Top Search Engine Marketing Mistakes to Avoid
Need help?
Maximising reach, engagement and traffic to your website can be tricky to master and making the most of organic search engine marketing strategies is sometimes best left to the experts.
Cathy and the team at CATCO Enterprises can assist with Search Engine Optimization advice and implementation. At CATCO Enterprises our emphasis is on quality, relevant website content and effective marketing strategies for your business. Call Cathy on 9797 0889 today.
