Understanding Search Marketing
When any business is willing to enhance its online presence, they tend to take help of Search Engine Marketing (SEM). Given the increased competition of millions of websites on search engines, it is important for marketers to understand and use the right tools properly in order to ensure they are optimizing their online presence correctly. This article is about the top every search engine marketer should have in their pocket.
Keyword Research and Analysis
One of the cornerstones successful SEM is comprehensive keyword research and analysis. This begins with keywords your target market is entering into a search engine to find products or services like yours. Google keyword planner, SEMrush and Moz Keyword Explorer are few recommended tools to discover keywords that matter the most such as search volume, competitiveness,trend etc.
On-Page Optimization
On-page elements must be optimized to increase organic search visibility. On-page optimization is a way of getting search engines to better understand the content and purpose of your web pages, from meta tags down to header structure. Yoast SEO, Moz On-Page Grader and Google Search Console conduct analysis on your website's on-page elements to see if you can fix anything like title tags, meta descriptions or url structures.
Off-Page Optimization
It has to do with your website overall reputation and authority on the Internet as it is related to external factors such as backlinks, social signals. Search engine marketers use tools like Ahrefs, Majestic and Moz Link Explorer to track backlinks from other websites, assess their quality as well as look out for competitor link-building strategies.
Content Marketing
Engaging users and making them stay on the page for longer, higher your search engine rankings with interesting yet quality-driven content. Search engine marketers can use tools such as BuzzSumo and Google Trends to ascertain what topics are popular, alongside the keywords that have started trending in order to create content which will stand out with their audience.
Link Building
One of the most important parts is off page optimization, where building high quality backlinks from well reputed sites comes into play. Other tools like Pitchbox, Ninja Outreach, or BuzzStream help search engine marketers to find these influential websites and outreach them in an optimized way in order to have natural backlinks.
Competitor Analysis
By reverse engineering your competitors' strategies, you can gain a lot of information to incorporate into your own SEM efforts. Search engine marketers can use tools like SEMrush, SpyFu and Ahrefs to see the keywords their competitors are targeting, ad campaigns they run and overall online visibility.
Tracking and Analytics
Like tracking SEM campaigns and website performance to give ROI as well data driven decisions are essential. Google and Bing Webmasters: They provide useful information about your site traffic, user behavior and visibility of your website on search engines.
Conversion Optimization
In traffic, that is half of problem-solving; the solution to converging those people into customers are very important as well. Optimizely, Crazy Egg and Google Optimize are some of the tools that allow search engine marketers to test different sections on their landing pages which helps them in increasing conversion rates and ultimately ROI.
Social Media and SEM
Combining social media marketing and SEM will help you to add an extra flavor in your online presence and brand visibility. Hootsuite, Buffer or Sprout Social etc are some of the tools used by Search engine marketers to run and track social posting as well thus running a proper channel.
Mobile and Local SEM
We all know that our usage of mobile devices is through the roof, so it has become essential to optimize around this and for doing well in local search. Google My Business (GMB) & Moz Local + Yext help search engine marketers to manage their online presence in local searches by distributing and syncing critical business info amongst many major directories, including those related directly with the various engines.
Paid Search Advertising
Organic search is key of course, but running paid ads enable the business to effectively get right up at the top on results. These paid search tools, such as Google Ads (AdWords), Bing Ads and Facebook ads manager, enable SEM's to create and run highly targeted ad campaigns that target specific keywords or demographics respectively in a particular location.
Summary: So, search engine marketers have plenty of tools to optimize their online presence well and can help websites get visibility as needed in between targeted or untargeted traffic. Including keyword research, competitor analysis, content marketing and conversion optimization these tools can improve the effectiveness to any SEM campaign. Stay abreast of the newest SEM tool applications and trends in a dynamic digital environment.
