Its no secret that preparing a successful Search Engine Marketing (SEM) campaign is critical to achieving the best performance and value for your advertising spend. And, good planning leads to good performance. Analysis and Optimization are critical for Search Engine Marketing (SEM). But without a good plan, analysis only tells you when things are going badly.
The best plans are made with great tools. While there are countless “pay-to-play” tools out there, Google offers free tools that are just as good if not better than the paid ones.
The first step in preparing a successful Search Engine Marketing Campaign is Keyword Research. SEM is about about keywords. This process should start with brainstorming the terms that are relevant to your business. Google provides server excellent tools that are perfect for this step:
1.) Google Insights for Search is a search tool for keywords and a topical analysis and comparison tool. It provides data going back to 2004 as well as forecasting for the next year based on statistical models.
The great thing about Google Insights for Search is that it provides:
- comparisons of up to five keywords at a time plus industry benchmarks
- news mentions
- geographic interest
- related terms
- rising related searches
This is a great tool for validating whether a keyword and or topic is a good fit for your business.
2.) Google Adwords Keyword Tool has been improved over the last several years and now provides an incredibly powerful means of generating keyword ideas. This tool is pretty straightforward…You can either enter keyword ideas to get data about thise terms or enter the URL page. This tool is great for traffic estimates for specific list of keywords. This tool features an option to download keywords, cost per click and estimated traffic into a spreadsheet. You can easily build campaigns based on the keywords you will find with this tool.
The best approach is to begin with Keywords brainstorming…Spend some time entering words to get more ideas. Use the Add button to collect the keywords that stand out as relevant to your campaign. Once you’ve reviewed and added relevant terms, download the selected words in Excel Format. Open the Excel spreadsheet, copy the list of selected keywords, and paste them back into the Keywords field in Suggestion tool. Then, click the Filter My Options link and select the Don’t Show Ideas for New Keywords check box. Then, you can click Get seasonality, and global versus local search volumes that are specific to your keywords.
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