Search Engine Marketing (SEM) for E-commerce
Posted by admin on August, 25th 2010
How many Search Engine Marketing techniques do you use? 1, 2, more….?
There are four different ways to maximise your online marketing campaign, some with short term gains, some with long term gains:
1. Pay Per Click Advertising
The quickest way to make sales online is to go directly to the search engines and pay for traffic. Now this is a risky technique as you may end up spending more than you profit from back!
Using a PPC system such as Google’s Adwords allows you to advertise besides search results when people type in certain phrases or words into Google. You pay every time someone clicks on your advert, not every time it is shown so you only pay for the traffic you receive which makes it controllable and scalable.
You may need for example 50 clicks for everytime you make a sale so if each click costs on average of 10 pence and each sale makes you £2 then you could be quickly throwing your money down the drain. The only way to improve this is to either sell more expensive products, make sure the adverts are more targeted or improve the conversion rate of your website.
Our advice is to start slowly with PPC advertising and once positive results come out of the stats you can ramp things up and up until you saturate your chosen online market. Refining the keywords you target and the amount of money you’re willing to spend on each click will increase profits further and should be an on-going day-by-day process.
2. Search Engine Optimisation
This is the most lucrative of all the search engine marketing techniques and involves getting your website placed highly when someone types in a certain keyword or key-phrase.
SEO involves several techniques to make your website look more popular to search engines such as Google, Bing, Ask and Yahoo. The more popular your website appears to the search giants the higher they will place you for searches related to your website.
The three main areas of SEO are website structure, website content and links from other websites.
Being number 1 in the search engines can draw between 30-40% of online searchers to your website, image how easy it would be to sell your products when there’s hundreds of people visiting your site per day!
3. Press Releases
SEM isn’t all about targeting results in search engines you can get your brand awareness up publicly by piggy-backing on other successful websites. Press releases are an instant way to market your brand or website but will be short lived in the ever changing face of online news and gossip.
Launching a press release can get an article about your brand shown on many press release websites and maybe even perhaps news and magazine websites too. All these sites have great power in the search engines any many people are likely to see them whether they are visiting the site or searching for related keyword in the search engines.
If you have a new product or brand then kick-start it off with an impressive press release and get yourself noticed!
4. Affiliate Marketing
Why sell your products when you can get thousands of other people to do it for you as well?!
Affiliate marketing means that other website owners will place your advert on their site’s and expect a acquisition cost per sale they pass on to your website. Websites related to your niche may want to make money by selling a product related to it. When a website visitor clicks on your advert on another website they are tracked using web ‘Cookies’. If they end up purchasing a product on your website then you will owe the external website owner (affiliate) either a percentage of the profits you made from the sale or a fixed cost per sale.
There are hundreds of affiliate websites which offer products and services from thousands of ecommerce websites. If you sold for example ‘gym equipment’ and you allowed affiliates to advertise your products for a commission then you could find your product being advertised on several sites in niches such as ‘weight loss’, ‘muscle gain’, ‘fitness’ etc.
Sticking your product/brand into an affiliate website takes time (and usually money) to set up. Companies such as the National Lottery and Boots make many millions of pounds per year from affiliate marketing; it was a key factor in making Amazon and Ebay so popular too.
Conclusion
If your ecommerce business is only doing one or two of these marketing strategies then it’s missing out on the bigger picture!
Search engine optimisation is the most important part of SEM yet affiliate marketing alone can bring your adverts onto thousands of related websites and could also make you serious money. For a quick fix then try the latest online PR methods or find a pay per click expert and turn clicks into profit, good luck!
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