Guía sobre SEM para pymes

Search Engine
Marketing for
Small Businesses
We’re taking on the task of tackling a huge topic: Search Engine Marketing.
That’s why we decided to create a Search Engine Marketing Guide for Small
Businesses. Don’t stay outside, find out how to get the most of your PPC
Campaigns.
What is Search Engine Marketing?
“Search engine marketing (SEM) is a form of internet marketing that involves
the promotion of websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results
pages (SERPs) through optimization and advertising.[1] SEM may use search
engine optimization (SEO), that adjusts or rewrites website content to achieve a
higher ranking in search engine results pages or use pay per click listings.”
In other words, it’s an all-encompassing term that includes pay-per click
advertising and search engine optimization.

2014. Landerapp.com. All Rights Reserved.

We Y Landing Pages |

2

The Guide
Chapters
1. What are your Search Engine Marketing Goals

04

3. How to Research your way to the Keyword Success

13

2. How to Understand your Target Audience

4. How to Find the Perfect Advertising Channel

5. How to Run a Pay-per-Click Campaign
6. How to Do SEO the Right Way

7. How to Get Started with Google Places

8. Test and Measure your Way to Search Engine Marketing
9. How to Convert your Prospects into Customers


09
17
22
28
34
38
44


3

1
WHAT ARE
YOUR
SEARCH ENGINE
MARKETING
GOALS

2013. www.landerapp.com. All Rights Reserved.


4

SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING GUIDE FOR SMALL BUSINESESS

SEM Guide

What are your Search Engine
Marketing Goals?
What do you specifically want to achieve with your Search Engine Marketing
(SEM) campaign? What are your SEM goals? Do you want to increase sales?
Increase traffic? Generate leads?
To get an idea of how to set goals for your SEM campaign, it’s valuable to
look at the state of the industry. Internet marketing goals are changing. Driving
site traffic, generating leads and increasing click-through rates used to be the
holy trinity of SEM goals. But branding has now become a significant goal.



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SEM Guide


1. Increasing Traffic
The traditional goal for Search Engine Marketing has always been to generate traffic. This is
where your Internet marketing has to start. There are many ways to increase traffic, and most
of them depend on your product and your audience. Here are some of the ways you can
increase traffic using SEM.
A. PAY-PER-CLICK
Pay-per-click (PPC) is a great way to drive initial traffic to a new site. However, it can be
expensive, depending on the keyword combinations you use. According to the SEMPRO
study, the following sites were most used by internet marketers as part of their PPC
campaigns: Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
B. SEO
SEO, or organic search, usually takes time to start generating traffic. Depending on keyword
competition and saturation, it can take from a month or two to almost a year to begin
showing results in search engines.
C. MOBILE
Mobile is the area to watch . The SEMPO survey found the mobile trend was the top concern
for marketers, with 47% rating mobile as a highly significant factor in their future SEM efforts.



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SEM Guide

As you can see, there are many ways to generate traffic. What you emphasize in your SEM
mix depends on many factors, such as:
• What industry you’re in
• our target market
Y
• he geography of your market
T

2. Generate Leads
Lead generation, enables you to establish a relationship with your potential customers via an
ongoing dialog, primarily through email. Brian Massey provides a useful series of formulas to
help companies think through their online lead generation strategy. Massey says in addition
to generating leads, you must also generate permission:
For a lead to truly become a lead, says Massey, your prospect has to take some action that
proves they are a lead. This usually comes in the form of permission. Your prospect gives you
permission to email them.

3. Sales
Selling your product or service is another important SEM goal. However, marketers have
placed this third in their goal priority for their SEM campaigns. Selling outright is important
when the product you sell is relatively inexpensive and your customers have time to wait for
delivery
However, for every online buyer who has an immediate need, there are many more potential
buyers who can be programmed to buy from you in the future.

4. Increase Brand Awareness
Though marketers mention branding as fourth in their SEM priorities, it is increasing in
importance. If you sell a consumer good that is only available in stores, like soft drinks,
gasoline and detergent, or if you are running a political campaign, a branding campaign might
be your primary goal.
You most likely won’t be selling Coke or Tide online, and voters cannot cast their vote by



7


SEM Guide

clicking on a “vote” button on your landing page.
However, driving brand awareness from a PPC campaign is completely different from the
large TV-based branding campaigns of the past. You need to establish some sort of metrics
to measure the value of your SEM campaign. For example: “…create some sort of common
value metric hopefully based on data, but minimally based on good intuitive reasoning…”



8

2
HOW TO
UNDERSTAND
YOUR TARGET
AUDIENCE



9

SEM Guide


How to Understand your Target
Audience
Before you do anything else: before you conduct keyword research, before
you write an ad, before you launch a PPC campaign, before you build a
landing page, you need to understand your target audience. And we’re not
talking about a generic target audience such as “women aged 20-40,” or
“Chief Marketing Officers of Mid-Sized companies.”
When we talk about our Target Audience we’re talking about the concept of
Persona. From now on you need to think about Personas- the audience we
are looking for – when we are designing our landing pages.
We’re talking about very specific personas, people that share certain
psychographic characteristics, goals, dreams, concerns, fears, values, and
points of view. We’ve reached an age where the “riches are in the niches.”
And there are infinite niches.



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SEM Guide

Using Personas
But why do we have to work with Personas? Why we need to stop thinking just in visitors?
Changing this mindset is difficult.
Visits are easy to work with, easy to segment (by keyword, by traffic source, by city, by
browser, by landing page) We have plenty of data from our visits.
In the other hand, people is very difficult to analyze. What do we know about the people
behind that visits? What are they like? How can we group them? How can deliver content
that fits their needs? This is where Personas come to the rescue.
Let’s start saying what a Persona is:
“Personas are archetypes that describe the various goals and observed behavior patterns
among your potential users and customers.” Kim Goodwin.
The average number of personas are from 3 to 5. Personas are not statistical or demographic
representations of users.

How do I create Personas?
It’s complex and time consuming. Said so, is a one time job that will give you an edge over
your competitors. The secret is to identify the BEHAVIORAL variables and link them to goals
and motivations. Having this is a cheat guide to succeed in our business



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SEM Guide


These are the 3 steps to build them:
1. Research
First of all you need to make your own research, where you have to identify the main roles,

try to arranged an interview with you stakeholders, do some surveys. You need to get all the
information to build a Persona.

2. Modeling
Now it’s time to analyze all this information, you need to get some conclusions. You’re

suppose to be able to identify behaviors, goals, personalities. You should be close to
create the Personas behind your visits.

3. Implement
You made the research, you analyzed that information, now it’s time to get in action! Design
your main scenarios, attached Persona’s goals with the business’s goals. Identify what
elements needs each persona to achieve their goals. More clear, now you have everything
you need to create your Persuasion strategy: How to seduce each persona.

So where do I begin?
Well let’s begin doing some interviews with your customer and your prospects, you can
meet with your service team to get involve with your customers like. This is a must!
You need to know your customer, what he or she wants. Also you can start an online
survey to find out what people is coming to do to your Website.

Once you’ve done that, you should know by now really well your customers, and be able to
identify the main roles accessing to your website. So now ask yourself: Am I optimized for
each one of them?



12

3
HOW TO
RESEARCH
YOUR WAY TO
THE KEYWORD
SUCCESS



13

SEM Guide


How to Research Your Way to
Keyword Success
With the objective to increase sales online, you should understand the identity
of your ideal customer. As we explained in the last chapter about Persona
Development, customers aren’t attracted with a general sales pitch.
Developing a user persona is just one step on the road to converting a
hypothetical persona to a real-life customer.
Understanding How People Search
One of the most important things you can do to identify with your customers is to

understand how people search. Understanding user personas will help you understand the
phrases they use to search for your product.
This is paramount to your online sales. Online searchers use certain words and phrases to
find what they are looking for. More than likely, researchers won’t be using your brand name

in their search for the product or service you offer. Your job with keyword research is to think
of the words used by an online customer, which will lead them to your brand.



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SEM Guide

The three groups of researchers with which you’re contending are:
• People who don’t yet know they have a need
• People who are comparison shopping
• People who have made a decision
The focus of your search engine marketing (SEM) campaign should be people who are
comparison shopping, and then convince them to make a decision on your product
or service. Keyword Research will assist in website optimization and in strengthening

your search ranking. It will also help you determine what content to develop for your
audience.

One place to start is your website. Ask yourself what the main focus of your website is,
then write down keywords related to that. If you have an idea of where to start, using Google
can help you expand your keywords. The suggested searches that Google provides will
further your search for words and phrases relating to your business.

These search engines will help you continue your quest for long tail keywords. They have a
higher value in terms of traffic because they have lower competition. Even if your website is
optimized for the most searched and popular words, optimizing it for long tail keywords will
strengthen the possibility of appearing in search results. When your website is optimized for



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SEM Guide


Broad Terms

Long Tail Keywords

keywords with lower competition, it doesn’t matter if each long tail keyword is only searched
once a year. If you have enough long tail keywords, they add up to moving as much traffic to
your site as popular keywords.

Researching Your Target Audience
The user personas you developed will be extremely helpful in researching and understanding
your target audience. You want to keep in mind the phrases that best describe the intentions
and needs of the personas you envision visiting your website. Just as your potential
customers have different motivations and are searching for different things that are important
to them in a product or service, your range of keywords should follow suit.
Rather than casting a broad net for customers, it’s better to think about specifics. Think about
the problems they have and how your product or service provides the perfect solution. Your
job is to be the suitable place for a person to bring their business. Your ideal customer will
appreciate that a business is out there which speaks to their needs and wants.



16

4
HOW TO FIND
THE PERFECT
ADVERTISING
CHANELL



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SEM Guide


How to Find the Perfect
Advertising Channel
What’s the best place to advertise online? The answer today is more
complicated than it’s ever been. Google AdWords is what comes to mind
when somebody thinks of a classic Pay-Per-Click campaign But the choices
are endless, and they’re getting more numerous. The question is: what’s the
perfect place for your customers and your particular product or service?
Where do your customers spend their time?
As we explained in chapter 2, before you decide where to advertise you’ll need to have a
detailed profile of who your target market is. What their likes are, their dislikes, their dreams,
problems, beliefs and hobbies.
Where does your ideal customer spend his or her time online?
• Do they have a favorite blog?

• Do they visit major news sites?

• Do they spend a lot of time on Facebook?

• Do they like watching cat videos on YouTube?

• Is your customer a traveling sales person who uses her phone to search for places to eat?



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SEM Guide

The Ever Growing List of Online Advertising Options?
Your Persona profile will tell you where your ideal customer spends his time, which is also the
key for the best way to reach them.
As we mentioned above, the list of where to advertise online is very long, and growing longer.
Ad networks, social media, individual blogs and independent websites are now being joined
by the mobile experience. Here’s a sample list of the most common places to advertise, but
this is by no means a comprehensive list.
Search Engines
Google AdWords is by far the best known and largest online property to advertise, with

Yahoo and Microsoft’s Bing in second and third places, respectively, in the U.S. However,

if your market is global, China’s Baidu network is ranked 2nd in the world, and fourth was
Russian’s Yandex network.
Ad Networks
Closely related to search engines are ad networks. Google, Yahoo, Bing and many other
companies manage advertising on third party sites. If you’ve ever visited several websites
in a row, and you saw the exact same ad in the header or the sidebar, then you probably
encountered sites whose advertising was managed by an ad network.



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SEM Guide


Two of the most famous are the Google Display Network and the Google Affiliate

Network. The Google Display Network is massive, encompassing more than 4 billion daily
page views, 700 million monthly users, and reaching more than 80% of the online audience.
It enables you as a business owner to advertise on potentially thousands or millions of
independent websites that your potential customers frequent on a daily basis.

Social Media Options
YouTube
YouTube is actually the third largest search engine in the U.S., and the fourth
in the world, according to Karmasnack. Using videos is a great way to

separate yourself from your competition, so this is an advertising property we
would pay special attention to.
Facebook
Facebook is amazing not just because of its sheer size, but also because
of the level of micro-targeting you have access to. You can target your

advertising with very detailed demographic and geographic options, allowing
you to spend far less than you would normally spend on a Google ad, yet
achieve much more targeted results.
Linkedin
If your buyer is more of a business buyer, then LinkedIn advertising is
probably a better fit. As with Facebook, you can target specific demographic
characteristics, with the addition of companies and industries. Again, a very
cost-effective way to micro-target your audience.
B2B Networks
If you sell a niche product or service to a B2B audience, you might want to
consider advertising on one of many niche websites or ad networks, such as
IT BusinessEdge and UBM Tech. For a younger, hipper IT crowd, venture



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SEM Guide


capitalists and geeky consumers, sites such as Mashable, TechCrunch,
GigaOm, VentureBeat, ReadWriteWeb, ClickDex and Sociable Blogs
present interesting alternative advertising networks.
Blogs
The beautiful thing about the web is that you can approach independent

owners of successful blogs that target your ideal customer. Many bloggers
don’t take advertising, but many do. Independent bloggers also provide an

added benefit: many of them are willing to enter into an affiliate relationship
with you. Essentially, you don’t pay for the ads until somebody actually buys
something, a great option if your advertising budget is low or non-existent.
Mobile Advertising
Mobile advertising is the brave new frontier of online advertising. I would
venture to say that anybody who advertises online should put this at the
front of their list (always taking into account who your target market is).

Mobile is the fastest growing way to reach the internet. It already surpasses
the desktop in most third world countries. If you haven’t made mobile a
centerpiece of your online marketing, you’re behind the eight ball.



21

5
HOW TO RUN
A PAY PER CLICK
CAMPAIGN



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SEM Guide


How to Run a Pay-Per-Click
Campaign
Once you’ve chosen where you will be advertising, it will benefit you to know
how the advertising will work. The most common form of online advertising
today is Pay-Per-click (PPC) advertising.

First Steps in Google Adwords:
Google AdWords is one of the most popular choices for a PPC campaign. If you’re

concerned about your budget, AdWords allows you to spend as much or as little as you
can. You’re not responsible for payment when your ad is displayed; instead, you owe when
your ad is clicked. Rates are determined by an automated auction system, and you decide
on the maximum amount, or the highest CPC bid, you’d like to spend on each customer that
clicks your ad.
The higher your bid, the higher your ad’s position on the search results page. Bidding
higher increases the chances of your target customers seeing, and therefore, clicking
your ad.



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SEM Guide


You don’t have to be the highest bidder to get results. As long as your ad is highly
targeted with relevant keywords, it will gain a substantial Quality Score.
Your Quality Score is important because it determines the usefulness of the keywords,

ads, and landing page to someone who spots your ad. Google AdWords enables you to

calculate your Quality Score for any of your keywords. Other features which assist your
relevancy include location, day of the week, and time of day, etc.
Although it is a good, measurable method, a PPC campaign does not ensure financial
success but is a valuable learning experience for the future. PPC advertising is an
experimental medium with which you will test what works and what doesn’t.

Campaigns
In terms of Google AdWords, a campaign encompasses many tools which Google has to

offer. A campaign is defined as a “set of ad groups (ads, keywords, and bids) that share

a budget, location targeting, and other settings”. An AdWords account isn’t limited to one
campaign, and multiple campaigns are actually encouraged.
Based on location, budget, distribution settings, language, etc., individual campaigns can

target different components. The purpose of an ad campaign is “to organize categories of
products or services that you offer.”



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SEM Guide

AdGroups
As described, AdGroups assist a campaign as a set of keywords, ads, and bids which

also play an integral role in how an account is organized. You also choose a bid for each
ad group. Google AdWords encourages you to build ad groups for each related product or
service in order for keywords and ads to belong to a certain theme.
According to Google AdWords, it’s also helpful to divide your ad groups into “selling

points (like free consultation and gourmet menus), or ways to describe your business (like
caterer and on-site food service).”

Landing Page Quality
The goal of a PPC campaign is to direct customers to your landing page. It is the page
on your website that they see upon clicking your ad. When clicking through to your landing
page, make sure they see exactly what they expected. Otherwise, you can bet on your
potential customer making a snap decision to hit the back button, which results in what is
called a bounce.
Regardless, you want your landing page to quickly engage a potential customer. Your

content should be high quality and correspond to their search or the ad clicked. Keep

in mind that the landing page experience also plays a role in a keyword’s Quality Score. It is
based on the number of links on the page, how easy it is to navigate, the content’s value and
suitability to the customer, among other factors.
When making your ad, you will be asked to choose a destination URL. This will most likely be
your landing page, unless you use a redirect feature for tracking purposes. Per Google policy,
a landing page and display URL must belong to the same website, sharing the same
domain. A display URL is the link featured in your ad.



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SEM Guide


LinkedIn, Facebook, and Bing Advertising:
Before choosing a LinkedIn ad, you have to answer the question as to whether it benefits

you and your business. The key is your business’ audience. If your products or services
are targeted at working professionals or business owners, then you want to look into
LinkedIn ads. The cost runs from two to five dollars, with a clickthrough rate of 0.025%.

There are a couple of tips you can use to help your clickthrough rate, or CTR. The first is to
run no more than two ads at a time.

In this case, less is more because you don’t want to hurt your ads’ chances of getting

clicked. Another tip is to change your ad every month. Not only does this assist with the
number of times your ad is shown (called impressions), a new ad will also increase your
opportunity to get a clickthrough than an older one.
As it turns out, users are clicking on Facebook ads. Generating more than $4 billion in

revenue for the social networking site, it may be useful to think about placing an ad. The

unique thing about Facebook ads is that they are somewhat personalized. Based on
profile information, demographics, and location, Facebook offers options that are exclusive
to how they create ads.
Once you’ve created an ad, you’re ready to set a budget. You have a couple of options
on the bidding process: each click or thousand impressions which your ad acquires.
A useful thing to remember about Facebook ads is that users are not on the website
to buy a product. The ad serves the purpose of a user becoming familiar with your brand
and products, such as via a display ad. Expecting a purchase is risky; instead, asking
someone to sign up or submit their email address is a low key approach to encouraging a
potential sale.


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SEM Guide

In the case of Bing, it is one of the largest paid search vendors. With more than 162 million
searchers on Microsoft and Yahoo! sites, Bing has more than 6 billion searches every month
and 30 percent of total search engine share. Bing ads work roughly the same way as

AdWords, sharing features such as setting your own budget and only paying when your ad is
clicked. A unique feature is importing your existing PPC campaigns

(i.e. Google AdWords) to Bing ads. It may be something to think about, considering that
keyword bidding is actually lower because the competition is lower.



27

6
HOW TO DO
SEO THE RIGHT
WAY



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SEM Guide


How to Do SEO The Right Way
When blogging started to catch on, around 2006, many people scrambled to
learn the dark arts of SEO: meta tags, keyword stuffing, backlink building, and
plugging into networks of virtual friends who would share your posts through
Digg, StumbleUpon and Delicious.

SEO Basics:
Google’s Panda and Penguin updates have changed the game for the blackhat SEO artists.
As Joe Pulizzi says in this Content Marketing Institute article:

“Search engine optimization (SEO) is an incredibly important top-of-the-funnel tactic. As Google
gets smarter, it’s almost impossible to game the system. Today, getting found through search
engines has more to do with amazing online storytelling than most anything else.”
This is a relief to most of us who believe in honest, straight forward marketing. But what does
it mean for you? It means you have to produce epic content that people will want to link to
and share with their friends and family.
How to produce epic content is a topic for another guide. But the basic premise is: create

content on a regular basis that your consumers or prospects will find extremely valuable.



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SEM Guide


How-tos, tutorials, thought leadership content, industry overviews, and new concepts fit the
bill. Creating product centric content or content that talks all about you and your products
does not. But I digress.
So, is SEO all about creating awesome content? That’s part of it. But there are some steps
you have to follow to make sure Google finds your web pages and landing pages, and
makes sure the people looking for your products and services find you.

A. Keyword Research
Good SEO always starts with keyword research. You need to identify the words your

ideal customers use to search for your product or service before you can optimize for
these keywords (to state the obvious). Always start with the initial words that describe your
product or service. For example, if you own a restaurant and brewery, you might start with the
keywords “brewery,” “brewpub,” and “craft beer.” These are your “seed” keywords.
Then you want to look at long-tail keywords. These are longer keywords, usually
compound terms composed of three or more words, that are searched less frequently, but
have less competition. You can use check your site’s Google Analytics to find the long-tail
keywords that actually bring people to your site.



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SEM Guide

Finally, you want to look at “keyword phrases.” Keyword phrases are the terms people

actually use to search for your product. How do you find your keyword phrases? You can
find these on Twitter, Facebook, comments on your blog. You can also read emails you
get from your customers to get the natural language they use.

Local Keywords
If your business has a storefront or provides services within a metropolitan area, don’t neglect
the hyper-local market. Add regional or local terms to your keywords, such as your state, city,
neighborhood and cross-streets.

B. Use your Keywords Intelligently
If you think we’re going to tell you that you need to add a bunch of keyword “meta-tags”

to each page on your website, think again. As noted earlier, SEO has changed. Google’s

Panda and Penguin updates rendered obsolete many of the traditional tactics internet
marketers used to “game” the system.

Some of the tactics Google is now penalizing are:
• Excessive link-building without regard to quality
• Deceptive doorway pages
• Lots of keyword stuffing
• Publishing lots of meaningless content just to get traffic from search engines
Title Tags
Each page has a title tag, but don’t confuse title tag with the title of the page. Your page

might have a title, also known as a “headline”, that your visitors see when they hit the page.
But your title tag is what shows up on those SERPS. This is a piece of code that tells

Google what your content is about, and it’s probably the most important place for your
keywords.



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SEM Guide


Why would you want your title tag and page headline to be different? A headline typically

appeals to human emotions. They’re designed to elicit curiosity. A title tag should be very
clear and straight-forward, as it tells the search engine what the content is supposed to be
about.
Body Content
You also want to use your keywords within your content. But be careful: don’t “stuff”

keywords all over your page. Make it natural. Write the way people talk. Don’t artificially
place keywords all over the place to try to trick Google to list you higher. Google might
actually list you lower!
The best way to use keywords in your body copy is to use the keyword phrases you

identified earlier. If you did this the right way, the keyword phrases reflect the natural way
people talk, so they should fit in quite nicely.

Meta Description
Google does not use the meta description to find and categorize your content. It uses
it to let human beings see a quick synopsis that describes what that site or page is all about.
Make sure your meta description is short (155 characters or less) and clear. You want to be
able to convince visitors to click on your link, not ignore it.!

C. Build Inbound Links
If your site has lots of valuable content that contains the keywords you researched, you’re
only halfway there, literally. Google places more emphasis on links than on anything

else. Why? Because if sites are linking to your content or website, then you probably provide
valuable content or a valuable service, and Google wants to provide consumers with quality,
valuable sites. However, be careful about the kind of inbound links you build. Matt Cutts, who
heads up Google’s Anti-Spam team, says Google values. hard links, not easy links.



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SEM Guide


Hard Links vs. Easy Links
Easy links are the results of link-farms, comment spam, and indiscriminate registration with

directories that don’t have any traffic. Hard links are links that people actually use. They’re
usually from authoritative websites with lots of traffic from loyal readers. “Yes, you want links,
but links that are hard to get, that take effort to obtain, that you’ve somehow earned, not
“easy links.””

How to get Hard Links
The best way to get hard links is actually not hard at all – if you provide valuable content. Jon
Morrow says guest blogging is one of the keys to drive high quality links back to your
site. When you submit your article or blog post, always provide a short biography about
yourself. It’s customary to provide a link back to your own website in your bio.

This should be a link with your preferred keyword as the anchor text pointing to the particular
page you want to be ranked for. Other than guest blogging, just try to write high quality

content that people enjoy and want to share with their friends. You will naturally attract
links from sites whose owners like your content.
• Research the keywords your customers actually use to find your product or service
• Write valuable content that people actually want to read, with the proper keywords in the title
tags and in the body copy
• Attract links from authoritative sites through legitimate means – attract hard links, not easy
links
Eventually, you’ll start to see results from your SEO efforts. But this is not over. Next, we’ll
cover the mechanics of local search using Google Places.



33

7
HOW TO
GET STARTED
WITH
GOOGLE PLACES



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SEM Guide


How to get started with
Google Places
They say location is everything. Well Google Places is one of the most
lucrative locations you can establish for your business, and is part of the
growing trend towards local search, and even hyper-local search. Ninetyseven percent of consumers search online for local products and services.
Are you there when they need you?
Complete Your Google Places Profile
The first place to start is to set up your Google Places account. Setting up an account
only takes five minutes. You’ll feel an iota of excitement when you’re greeted with the

message,“Welcome to Google Places for Business!” You’ll be asked to verify your account
and you’ll have the option to stay “informed of future releases and other relevant information.”
Essentially, to subscribe to the Google Places newsletter. I’d subscribe if I were you, because
it’s full of valuable information that can help you in the future.

Be sure to verify your account. When you have a verified account, your business will show
up in local listings. You’ll also be allowed to edit your listing. One thing to note is that any

edits will undergo a quality check before being updated. Several business days can go by
without any changes appearing, and the previous version will continue to be present, so
don’t panic if your changes aren’t showing up!


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SEM Guide


Add your logo, choose your business category, and enter your address, phone number,
and hours of operation. Places even encourages you to complete your profile by declaring

the information you left out “missing” (i.e. “Missing hours of operation”, “Missing description
about your business”). You’ll then be shown a link to “Add it”.
The information you provide enables Google to analyze your business and further assess
when it should be listed in Google search results, including Google+, Earth, and Maps
Because your Google+ Local page and Google Places listing are linked, you can manage
them simultaneously. Even though Places and Google+ Local are separate entities, any edits
you make to your Places listing will automatically apply to your Google+ Local page.

Your Reviews are an Opportunity
Besides providing the means for your business to be found, Google Places serves another
purpose: providing critical customer feedback. Seventy-two percent of consumers rely
on online reviews, and more than half are likely to visit your business based on a favorable
review.
Online reviews are important because they let you know how your business is

perceived by your customers. You’ll have the opportunity to interact with them and respond
to both positive and negative feedback.



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SEM Guide


Remember that negative feedback is an opportunity, as well. If you don’t want your
response to be on display, offer the customer a chance to personally contact you in order

to address the feedback. Your customers will appreciate your accessibility, and learning
from your mistakes will only make your business better.

Try Google Offers for Free
Consumers love promotional giveaways, and Google Places offers a coupon generator
to drive consumers to your door. After you have verified your authority within the business,
your Google Places account will give you access to the coupon generator, known as

Google Offers. Google Offers lets you present a promotion to potential and returning

customers. The type of offer is your choice, and you determine the length of time it will run.
Within hours, you will be ready to receive your first Google Offer from a customer.
When using Google Maps, consumers will find the coupon searching for your type of

business via their mobile device. The person has to be located near your business in order
to find the offer, but this is an advantage because they can visit you right away.
Your knowledge of keyword search will come in handy because you’ll recognize the

advantage of choosing categories that describe your business. You want to make it
as easy as possible for potential customers to find you, and the categories you choose to
describe your business will show up in their keyword search.
Google Places for Business is a growing source of traffic to local businesses, and is
especially valuable as mobile becomes more important. Your homework today is to go and
claim your Google Places location right away. Next step? Measure your actions!



37

8
TEST AND
MEASURE
YOUR WAY TO
SEARCH ENGINE
MARKETING



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SEM Guide

Test and Measure Your Way to
Search Engine Marketing Success
Your meticulous planning based on your knowledge of internet marketing best
practices will fail you when your Search Engine Marketing campaign sees the
light of day. This is a sad but true fact. But it’s also liberating. It means you’re
free to test new theories and implement new ideas, and see if they work or not.
Let’s Tackle Vanity Metrics
Page views. Unique visitors. Number of pages per visit. Average visit duration. None of this

matters. These are vanity metrics that make you feel good if they go up, and make you
feel bad if they go down. You can get whiplash following the ups and downs of your daily
vanity analytics numbers.
The problem with vanity metrics is they don’t tell you how your SEM campaign is doing.
They don’t tell you if:

• The right people are coming to your site
• They are engaged by your content

• They sign up for your mailing list, online demo, or click the “contact us” link
• They purchase your products



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SEM Guide


To know any of these important pieces of information, you need to focus on the right

metrics. We previously spoke about setting goals for your SEM campaign. Now you’ve got
to put your goals into a practical system where you can track, measure and test these goals
in order to improve your SEM campaign’s performance.

Your Hypothesis
You first must determine what you’ll measure and what you’ll test. It’s impossible to

measure something when you don’t know what to measure, so you’ve got to do what
scientists have been doing for years: develop a hypothesis.
Your hypothesis is what you believe will happen as a result of your SEM efforts, and it’s
a little more complicated than customers clicking on your ad, falling in love with your product,
and buying it.
To come up with a hypothesis for your own product, take a little bit of time to think about
and document the particular path to purchase for your product. And your path may

not even be to purchase anything – it may be to increase the number of subscribers to your
newsletter, or to reach 100,000 likes on your Facebook page.



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SEM Guide


Putting Together Your Hypothesis
Now you have to be a little creative. Think about the scenarios I mentioned above, and then
think about your particular product and how your path to sales would look like.
Answering these questions might be helpful:
• What is your target market? Who is your target persona?

• What are their typical online behaviors? What are their favorite websites and social
networks? How much time to they spend online?

• Do they access the web from a desktop or laptop computer from work, or are they
primarily a mobile user accessing the web while she’s in class at university?

• Do they subscribe to newsletters?

• Are they impulse buyers, or do they have to make a decision with a committee?
• Is your product sold online, at a retail location, or through a complex B2B sales process?
• What other questions can you add to this list?

Measuring your Sales Funnel
Your conversion hypothesis is the design you will use to build your online sales funnel. Your
sales funnel will consist of:
• Your online ads
• Your landing pages, blog posts, home page, and product pages
• Your nurturing vehicles, such as your email newsletter
• Your call-to-actions, and
• Your conversion actions
Each of these are steps in your sales or conversion funnel. Each of these steps provides
a point at which you can record relevant data, the data that lets you know how you’re doing.
Using Google Analytics or any number of other online measurement tools, measure how
people move from one stage to the next.



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SEM Guide

Measure:
• The Click Through Rate (CTR) of your PPC ad
• The bounce rate for your landing page
• The conversion for your call-to-action
• The subscription rate for your newsletter
• The download rate on your white paper, case study or special report
• Clicks on your contact us page
• Shopping cart abandonment rate
• Hits to your “thank you page.
This last measurement is the most important for you if you sell something from your website.
It’s referred to as your tripwire. Google Analytics lets you set up conversion goals and

funnels so you can get away from vanity metrics and measure how effective your SEM
campaign is in driving sales.

Testing For Success
Finally, you’ve got to test. Or to put it another way, conduct experiments. The reason is
simple: if you’ve launched an online marketing campaign before, your initial results will be
much worse than you expected. 1-2% conversion rates are typical.
You may be happy with that rate, but it’s sub-optimal, and you can achieve so much more.
Testing will allow you to try alternative versions of your calls-to-action, headlines, body

copy, PPC ads, colors, positioning of elements and landing page structure, to see if you
can improve the conversion rate at each stage of the funnel.



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SEM Guide

We discussed A/B testing in our blog, but it’s important to emphasize a few points:

1. ABT: Always Be Testing.
You should make testing a habit. Always have ongoing tests for your headlines, your calls-toaction, your conversion forms, or any point in your conversion funnel where you might lose a
prospect.

2. Test one element at a time.
To really know what affects your conversion rates at any point in your conversion funnel, test only
one element at a time. Test your headline, then test your bullet points, then test the color of your
call-to-action button. But don’t test them all in the same test.

3. Don’t cut your test short.
Many marketers make the mistake of cutting their tests short. Don’t make that mistake
yourself. You need statistically significant data. Let your tests run long enough to collect the
data you need to make a decision about either replacing your current conversion element or
keeping it.
Each of these are steps in your sales or conversion funnel. Each of these steps provides a
point at which you can record relevant data, the data that lets you know how you’re doing.



43

9
HOW TO
CONVERT YOUR
PROSPECTS
INTO
CUSTOMERS



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SEM Guide

How to Convert your Prospects
into Customers
We’ve come full circle in this ebook. You’ve learned how to test and measure
your search engine marketing efforts. You’ve relied on Google Adwords ,
Google Places , Yahoo, Bing, and a host of other online spaces to connect
with your ideal customer. But Search Engine Marketing is not complete without
conversion.
You now must convert your visitors into paying customers. And even though
you may have other goals, such as increasing engagement, or improve your
exposure, ultimately your goal is to get paying customers. Or else why are you
in business? So what is conversion anyway?



45

SEM Guide


Conversion Optimization
On average a website converts two percent of its visitors into customers. But you can make
that figure much higher – to ten percent (or more). According to Brian Massey in his book,
“Your Customer Creation Equation”: The conversion rate is the number of conversions
divided by the number of visitors who come for a given period of time.” In other words,
conversion rate equals actions divided by traffic.
Increase your conversion rate in one of two ways:
• Reduce the number of visitors who don’t plan on seriously considering a purchase
• Increase the number of visitors who take action on your landing page

But there are many areas that you must optimize.
A. THE HEADLINE
Make your headline as compelling as possible. A headline with a benefit, or a combination of
problem/solution is usually the best way to go.



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SEM Guide

B. THE BODY COPY
Most of us think of copy as the words written on a page. But copy can also include images
and design.
C. THE CALL TO ACTION
Your call-to-action can be a big fat juicy “Buy Now” button, sign-up form or a simple hyperlinked words that says “click here.”
D. THE ONLINE FORM
If your form is to collect credit card information, you have no choice but to ask for as much
information as you need to charge their credit card. Make this form attractive and easy to
use. If you’re trying to get people to subscribe to your newsletter or download your white
paper, the more information you make your visitors fill out, the lower your conversion rate.
E. THE POSITIONING OF THE ELEMENTS
Finally, will you put your call-to-action button in the middle of the page, or just below the
body copy? Will you place your body copy to the left of your page and your sign-up form on
the right?

To improve the conversion of any of these elements, conduct A/B tests, small experiments
in which you change an aspect of each element to see which converts better. Brian Massey
said: “We must accept the fact that conversion is first and foremost about measuring results.”
To get results, you don’t want to try something different without a reason. Think of it as a
hypothesis. When you make a change, measure whether it improved or decreased your
conversion rate.
When testing your hypotheses, be sure to eliminate the things that didn’t work and

keep the things that did. Your experience with testing will result in a higher conversion rate
and lower marketing costs, and you’ll have mastered conversion, the ultimate goal in your
business’s online success.



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SEM Guide


Final Words
Well, the inevitable has happened, we get at the end of this SEM Guide for Small Businesses.
We’re sad it’s finally ending. But we see this not as an ending, but as a beginning.
This Search Engine Marketing series just scratched the surface. There is so much you can
learn. But don’t let what you don’t know stop you. A person can go crazy trying to learn more
and more, and never implementing anything. We recommend the following:
• Create a search engine marketing plan, with goals that are appropriate for your business
• Study your ideal customer and create your buyer personas
• Research the keywords your ideal customer will use to look for what you’re offering
• Research and decide where to advertise
• Launch your pay-per-click campaign
• Optimize your website and landing pages for search engines
• If you have a retail location, optimize your web presence for local search, including Google
Places
• Set up your testing and measuring system
• Make sure each one of your conversion steps will efficiently move your prospect closer to
purchasing your product
• Finally, sign up for a free account with Lander so you can create that conversion oriented
landing page!



48

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49

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READING
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