Search marketing (SEM) is a set of tactics designed to help people find your website quickly and easily. With more than 70% of the US public using search engines to do research before they buy, and over 3 billion searches done every day—getting found online is crucial to growing your business.

SEM is specifically aimed at increasing your website’s overall page rank in the search engines, especially Google.

Much of this is done through search engine optimization (SEO)—making sure that each piece of content, whether it’s a web page, blog post, video or .PDF contains your targeted keywords and phrases in specific places, in specific ways.

Delivering Results

But delivering SEM results goes well beyond standard SEO activities such as tweaking title tags and meta information, inserting keywords to existing content or even paying for links from other sites.

It takes a comprehensive plan based on a thorough analysis of your site, your competitors’ sites, what your customers search for, where they’re searching and who they trust.

This way, you know what kind of content to focus on, which specific sites need to link to you, what keywords you can dominate quickly, which social media sites to focus on, and a strategy to take over high traffic keywords dominated by other sites.

All of this results in more than just increased traffic. It means more qualified traffic comes to your site, making it easier for you to capture leads, nurture their interest and convert them into paying customers.

A solid SEM plan also shows how to improve your site technologically. For instance, using Flash or AJAX can impede your site’s load time and make key content invisible to search engines.

Search engines spider the web constantly searching for fresh, useful and relevant content. They do that because your prospective customers hunger for content they value. Content that helps them make buying decisions. As a result, one of the most effective content marketing strategies is a regularly published blog coupled with sharing blog posts through social marketing. And the more often you publish and share, the better. In fact, companies that blog see:

• 55% more site traffic
• 97% more inbound links
• 434% more indexed pages

In addition, 67% acquired a customer through their company blog!

Blog posts don’t have to always contain ground-breaking information. What makes content “fresh” is your unique perspective or interpretation that makes your content (or someone else’s) useful and relevant to your audience. Blogging is the simplest and easiest way to do that. Blog posts are ranked higher by search engines than standard web pages. And video blogs are especially “tasty” to search engines, helping even more to pull your site up in page rankings.

When your search engine marketing plan (SEM) works hand-in-glove with your content marketing and social marketing plans, it produces powerful results.

We offer the following Search Engine Marketing Services:

• Comprehensive SEM plan development
• Website architecture
• Keyword research and competitive analysis
• Keyword campaign segmentation
• Links — internal (optimizing URLs, fixing broken ones, 403 redirects), building external
• New and existing content optimization
• File tagging
• Ongoing tracking, analysis and keyword refinement