Yep - all the pre-Halloween marketing and blogosphere hoopla departed on a disappointingly whimpering tone when the biggest scare of the season (for folks living and working in the Northeast, like the SEM Zen team) turned out to be Mother Nature. (Or climate change – take your pick.)
We hope all who are reading this blog and experienced October’s snowstorm have electricity and Internet access by now, and didn’t suffer too much inconvenience. Many an Angry Birds costume (one of the top 10 sought after in 2011, according to search engine reports) will be lofted away to a closet shelf after party or trick-or-treating plans were canceled. Though the Angry Birds Halloween spirit will continue to live on via this Alfred Hitchcock-esque online video short that you can find on the G4TV website.
What Does Halloween Have to Do With Internet Marketing?
By now, we knew you would be asking. The simple answer for some, in one word: Fear.
Online marketing and advertising are essential parts of doing business today, but require time, resources and knowledge that small businesses, in particular, often don’t have. The one thing that (ironically) scares many people about the Internet marketing universe is analytics - the sheer array of data that’s available to help you understand how to reach online customers.
For the SEO/SEM uninitiated, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is a good place to get your feet wet. Here are a couple of things you should know about PPC:
1. PPC is basically a direct marketing approach to promoting your business. With so much competition online, new businesses or websites in particular often find it difficult to compete for customers. With PPC advertising, you will have instant online exposure while working out the finer points of an overall SEO strategy.
2. PPC is a great tool to identify the most effective keywords for your business. Keywords, when properly selected and consistently utilized, are one of the most fundamental components of Internet marketing. Your business can’t target every relevant keyword, but using PPC and Google’s AdWords keyword tool, you can test which keywords you should be targeting.
Some recent changes to the AdWords tool have made it a bit easier for casual users to interpret keyword metrics. For example, the bar graphs for keyword competitiveness have been replaced with the descriptives “high,” “medium” or “low.”
Nevertheless, getting your hands around the bigger picture of search engine marketing can be a bit daunting. Call SEM Zen to send your apprehensions packing.
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