How to Improve Your Search Engine Marketing Process

Improve Your SEM Process

One of the biggest mistakes we see with managers and business owners who handle their own SEO is that they think they can just throw a few keywords onto a page and call it good. Most people fall for this because it’s easy, not because it’s effective. You need to consider how important the targeted keyword phrase will be to ranking for, as well as what other search terms should be targeted based on current search engine traffic.

Search Synthesis

The first step to search engine marketing is synthesizing a list of search terms that represents the keywords that you want to target. You can find search data for pretty much any search term you want by going to Google Adwords Keyword Tool, WordTracker, SEObook Keyword Tool, Overture search data, or some other search term generator. Begin by identifying the search terms that are most important to your product or service. You can use search volume and competition from search engines as a measure of ranking importance.

Search Engine Marketing Report

If you’re familiar with Excel then you should be able to generate the search terms you want. Try to use search volume as well as search competitiveness to determine which search terms should be prioritized higher than others. Have multiple people go through this process independently and compare their search results afterwards, noting down any discrepancies between search term lists so that you can address them later on during the optimization process.

Once you have your search term list synthesized it’s time to choose the search terms that are most relevant to your product or service. Sometimes search terms appear with an implicit “-” in front, which means they’re not relevant to your site.

Google Search Result Page

In addition to being unable to use search terms that have implicit dashes included, you’ll also have to refrain from search terms that include misspellings, acronyms, and other search terms that could represent your product.
In the example you can see how search engines have to display results for anything containing a search term in quotes, regardless of whether or not it’s relevant to what you’re looking for. This is a good search term for you, but it’s definitely not the only search term that search engines will look at.

For example, if you own a bakery you should target search terms like “baked goods”, “cookie recipes”, and so on. If you search for “cookie recipes” which is a search term that isn’t relevant to your product, the search results will display a page like this.

There are many ways to synthesize a list of search terms; there’s no way we could cover it all. On the other hand if search term lists are being processed improperly or incompletely, search engines will display search results pages like this instead. Once you have the list of search terms that represent your keywords synthesized you’re ready to start search engine marketing. Check out search terms that show search engines what your site is all about and then use search terms that capture how people search for information related to your product or service.