Quite often, we get asked questions like “How much should i spend per month on paid search?” - This one is a fantastic question, however, there is really only one person who can answer that and that is you!

Some things to consider when developing a budget for your paid search campaign:

1. Determine some solid campaign goals. These can be branding, traffic, conversions or whatever other metric you find is most relevant to your business.
2. How much each click is going to cost you - Do some keyword research, try to get an idea of what each click is going to cost you.
3. Workout how many clicks you need to make a difference to your bottom line and at what point you make a profit. I would recommend analyzing your current conversion data and starting with that to workout your ROI.

Now that you have some basic figures around what goals you need to hit to make you profitable, you should be able to work backwards and then workout how much money you can spend on your paid search campaign.

If you are running a CPA based campaign and you are making profit directly from the clicks, then its an easy argument to say that your budget should be unlimited. The more clicks, the more profit. Simple, so as long as you keep hitting your average conversion goals and your CPC stays within your target range, let it spend!

If you are after click volume and your revenue is based on lets say page views through an advertising network, the equation isn’t much different. Take your average CPM and work backwards, taking into account things such as the average number of times each user returns to the site etc to see how much you can afford to pay per click and still remain profitable.

The tough decision with budgets comes on purely brand based campaigns as the flow on effect from this is sometimes hard to directly attribute to paid search. So i guess, without knowing specifics about the brand, the tracking or anything else this is more of a “What can i afford to spend” kind of dilemma where you bite the bullet and allocate X$ per month and then re-evaluate.

This isn’t intended to be an in depth article about defining budgets, simply some thoughts around ways of allocating budgets and getting clients thinking about some more fundamental questions which factor into their search budget allocation.

Popularity: 21%

Google is in the middle of a very quiet revolution, changing the search results right before your very eyes, introducing a new type of search which has been dubbed “universal search” by most, others call it blended search. Whatever you call it, its changing the way that SEO professionals optimize website content.

Universal search brings together components of web, book, blog, video, news and many more different types of search onto the one results page, all blended seamlessly so that the average Joe doesn’t know the difference between one or the other, they simply get results tailored to their search query from various different sources.

The interesting question facing marketers, is how to take advantage of these new elements, which feature prominently within SERPS? Do you focus your time on optimizing video content, tagging images, writing a blog, publishing ebooks?!?

Need an example of universal search? Try searching Google.com for “los angeles bars” and this is what you will see:

Universal Search Example:

Ok, so we now know what universal search optimization can cover, basically any kind of web content so here is my guide to help priotize your online content efforts, in order of easiest to hardest.

1. Tagging your images: This is a no brainer and one of the easiest ways to start to get some additional traffic from the search engines. Tagging all images contained on your website with the correct alt text and description fields, gives you the opportunity to basically show a banner ad at the very top of a search result, if Google deems your image to be highly relevant.
2. Optimizing video content: Make your video useful or informational (Don’t waste users time), tag your video with popular terms which relate to the content, keep the video short and to the point, put your logo on the video and always ensure that you name your video so that it is relevant to the content and the keywords associated with it. Another great tip is to always include your videos in a “video sitemap” so that the search engines can find it all and finally use html to describe the contents of your video because search engines still love HTML best!
3. News content: If Google or Yahoo or any other news aggregators, truly think your site is newsworthy, they will generally add you to their index on their own, however for the majority of us it’s a matter of writing content, building up a reasonable level of quality and then submitting for approval. Once approved, news based search results can deliver lots of relevant traffic and the same old rules apply, write good quality, keyword rich, feature articles and make them worthwhile for users to read.
4. Local search: Getting listed within local search results can be as simple as adding your website to the local business ads section index within your adwords account, the reason that i put this as #4 was because you generally have to pay for the listing on a per click basis. However Google will also give you that one, free, map based link if you claim ownership of your business address, via a verification process. Click here for more information on Local business ads
5. Book search: Now this is a tougher one, simply because you have to take the time to write a book! It’s not as easy as it sounds but if you have the time, write a book on something you are truly passionate about, something you have a strong opinion on and then publish it as a PDF. Do your research and find popular phrases, using tools like wordtracker or keyword elite and featuring these phrases heavily within your original content. Once you have written your book, published it, it looks all pretty. Register it for a Google book ID and you are done, if people are searching for phrases which are highly relevant to your publication, there is a good change your book will be shown.

If you currently use a third party search agency to optimize your website, make sure you ask them what they are doing for your universal optimization, be proactive and findout their guidelines and strategies and ask questions about where they think the future is heading and get in before your competition does.

Those tips above are useful, but the most important thing to remember when optimizing your search marketing, is to try and deliver unique, meaningful content to users. Google and Yahoo both love to deliver the freshest, most useful webpage’s to their users, so if you write it (and optimize it properly) they will come.

Popularity: 56%

Search Engine Marketing is so often touted as the best thing ever to happen to marketing, the be all and end all of promotion and the most trackable and closely scrutinized of all marketing avenues.
Many companies start out with the mentality “Ok we need to do SEM, get it setup and lets spend some money getting all the clicks we can get” without giving a thought to what they REALLY want to get out of their SEM campaigns. The more clicks a company generally receives and the lower their Cost Per Click the happier they are and there are always lots of handshakes at meetings and happy campers.

This mentality is WRONG!!!!! Let me explain why. Before any search marketing campaign starts you should truly consider what your business goals are, some examples would be; Customer Acquisition, Information Requests (customer submitting a request for more information from your company), Click Volume, Revenue Per Visitor. Now there are many more potential positive outcomes from your search marketing but they were just a few examples. The reason why basing your SEM success purely on click goals or cost per click is that it doesnt accurately reflect your businesses ROI and this is where conversion tracking comes in.

Conversion tracking works by inserting code onto your website which allows marketers to track actions on your website and correlate which keywords, ads or adgroups are driving the greatest amount of real value to your business. This isn’t rocket science and let me reiterate what i am saying here; Without conversion tracking or properly defined business goals which allow for some kind of real world measurement of success you are THROWING YOUR MONEY AWAY!

Ok, so now that we have my little rant out of the way you may be asking “what options are there for tracking success on my website?” Who would have guessed that there are literally hundreds of free solutions out there however the two most obvious and most powerful are Googles conversion tracking and Yahoo’s conversion tracking tools. Both of these are good, free, solutions which allow every aspect of your campaigns to be measured against your business goals, optimised to increase the performance in relation to that and also to easily be reported on.

The distinct advantage that Google’s conversion tracking has over Yahoo’s tool is that it ties directly into Google Analytics and then becomes a far more powerful tool for tracking every aspect of your sites performance.

If you have any questions regarding conversion tracking and how it can benefit you, or if you just think you need some help in defining your business goals. Come on over to LoveClients.com and we are more than happy to speak with you!

Popularity: 93%

Ok, so everybody on earth has used Google or Yahoo or some kind of search engine. So chances are, you have come across paid search campaigns before! Did you recognize the ads as paid?.. Chances are if you have been around the internet for long enough you would be used to these ads and they probably blend into your everyday searching without causing a stir.

Did you know that quite often people are paying $1,5 or even $50 per click to get traffic via these paid links??! You may think, why the hell would somebody pay $50 per click? Well the truth is, that if you were making $100 per click, paying $50 isnt that bad! - It’s sort of like poker, you are never going to be 100% sure that spending $50 on a click is going to pay off every time, but by making the educated decision and the “right play” more often than not that click is going to deliver a good return on investment!

Paid search is a science and the basics premise behind it is to buy clicks that are valuable to your website and get a good ROI from the campaign as a whole. Lots of individual elements come together across the whole campaign to deliver the end results. Paid search combines elements of marketing, advertising, copywriting, analytics, accounting and many other smaller elements together.

The main differences between paid search and organic search is that paid search can deliver instant traffic on demand which is highly accountable and can be constantly optimised towards many different end goals including a lower cost per click, higher traffic volumes, more conversions or any other metric which you desire.

Paid search isnt going to do everything for your business, it wont make your site convert better if it sucks. It wont do the ironing for you or cook you dinner It CAN however deliver real value to your business by getting your brand in front of consumers when they are in the right frame of mind to purchase your products or become a loyal follower of your message. The difference between an average search marketing campaign and a good one can be the difference between buying a ferrari or a fiat!!

I haven’t gone into too much detail in thos post about the inner workings of SEM but stay tuned for some far more detailed insights into the world of paid search!

Popularity: 29%