Many search engine marketers exhaust themselves worrying about keywords, local search engines ranking, localized landing pages, etc. Little consideration is given to other aspects that can have a huge impact on the performance of their campaigns. By understanding variations in seasons, fiscal years, and popular vacation times, you can ensure that you connect with your potential customers when they're in the buying mode. Here are some factors to consider:

Corporate Fiscal Years

If you are marketing your products overseas, it helps to know when their fiscal years begins and ends. In many countries it ends in March, as opposed to December. Knowing this can help you target corporate who are looking to spend their surplus cash in the month of February and March. Also, April would imply fresh budgets, when companies are likely to have more cash in hand.

( Read more )

You can blame the low conversion rate on recession, but this is not going to help you succeed in your online business. In spite of the economic slow down, many online businesses are doing well. Hence, downturn is not the reason for the low conversion.

The problem may be with your landing page. Businesses are over-utilizing the landing pages. These have become dumping grounds for data, each vying with the others to grab the attention of the user. The hapless consumer has to sift through this maze to find what they were searching for.

Here are some tips to help you solve this problem:

1. Add a call to action feature: This helps the consumer to reach a decision easily and fast.

( Read more )

Press releases had been around for a long time, but are never given as much importance and exposure as they deserve. The obvious reason is that they are not as glamorous as social media or search engine marketing.

As a marketing tool for small businesses, search engine rankings are very important. It helps in garnering the traffic to the site, which in turn improves its finances. Though search engine ranking is vital for a successful business, the actual work involved is challenging, to say the least.

( Read more )

Even though recession is causing the demise of many companies across different sectors, one industry in the UK is flourishing- the SEM industry.

As the internet pervades more and more areas of our life, businesses and companies are beginning to find out the marketing opportunity that is available online. To begin with, internet advertising is a lot cheaper than many other traditional media options. But more importantly, as people are starting to look for information online for almost every need they have, marketing opportunities are multiplying at an alarming rate. More and more businesses are getting interested in online marketing and the need for SEM professionals is on the rise.

( Read more )

Over the last decade or so, the presence of the Internet has pervaded every aspect of our lives. Whether we are looking for gifts for a loved one, or a restaurant to order dinner from, or even to book a room at a holiday destination, we depend on the internet to find whatever it is that we are looking for. And, when we say Internet, what we actually mean is search engines on the Internet. Research into user behavior on the net has illustrated how regularly an average internet user uses a search engine to look for information, product, service or entertainment.

Search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. have learnt to monetize this trend of search engine usage. On one hand, they search the Internet for the most relevant search result for the search query entered by the user and display them. On the other hand, they also display a series of paid ads based on the keyword entered for search. These ads are chosen on the relevance of the keyword to the search query and the advertiser’s bid for the keyword, meaning the amount the advertiser is willing to pay for every click on his ads.

For every business, it helps to be on the first few pages of the search results. Research has proven that users are most likely to click on links that are displayed on page one of search results. Some users may go as far as the second or third page of search results, but it is not very common for users to look beyond the third page for the information, product, service or entertainment they are looking for. More often than not, if a user does not find what he is looking for in the first few pages, he is more likely to refine his search query than look further than first few pages. However, this is true for both the organic search results and online ads.


( Read more )