What Is Search Engine Marketing Intelligence?
Search engine marketing (SEM) refers to utilizing paid ads to appear higher in SERPs. SEM strategies involve bidding on powerful keywords that individuals often use to search various topics on Google, Bing, and Yahoo. These pay-per-click ads are not only cost-effective but also propel you to the top of the results. They come in different formats, including text-based and product-based, like product listing ads. On the other hand, search engine marketing intelligence refers to the tips you follow to collect and analyze campaign data. Metrics like click-through rates, conversion rates, and keyword rankings help you identify why campaigns succeed. Therefore, you make informed decisions regarding your strategy and identify trends and opportunities in your niche.
But how does SEM guarantee increased sales? The keywords you use expose you to audience members who are highly motivated to purchase. They may be in the consideration stage, looking for viable solutions to invest in, and seeing your product or service at the top of the search results might inspire them to check you out.
Is your poor search engine ranking affecting your business sales?
PPC directory listing ads can also improve your ranking while generating more website visits.
The Benefits Of Search Engine Marketing Intelligence
Digital advertising intelligence allows you to track your campaign’s performance in real time and modify it accordingly. Keeping a close eye on your marketing results helps you make strategic changes, improving your targeting and ROI. At the same time, SEM offers advanced tools to report on your campaign’s performance by monitoring metrics, identifying trends, and creating efficient reports.
SEM specialists typically conduct an SEO competitor analysis before creating their campaigns. Why? Checking what others in the field are doing and how well or poorly their methods work helps you establish your own pathway. Sure, your target audience may differ slightly, but other search engine marketing examples showcase people’s online behavior and reactions to specific keywords and ad types.
Companies often look for search engine marketing optimization tips that will help them improve their targeting. SEM intelligence allows you to dive deeper and understand your customers’ needs and online behavior. Therefore, you are able to craft promotional campaigns that resonate perfectly with people’s preferences and pain points, increasing your conversion rates and ROI.
Search engine marketing intelligence allows you to analyze the performance of keywords you want to use, ad copy, and targeting options so you can make the best possible choice. Once you are certain about your marketing tactics, you can set a budget that fits your campaign’s needs without wasting resources.
How Does Search Engine Marketing Intelligence Work?
Ad Auctions
Before your search engine listing goes live, it goes through a process known as an ad auction. To enter this process, you must identify the keywords you want to bid on and state how much money you are willing to spend per click. Google then analyzes whether your keywords are included in users’ search queries, and if they are, you enter the ad auction. If you have entered multiple keywords, it doesn’t mean that your ad will appear when someone searches for any of them, because not every keyword has commercial value.
Winning An Ad Auction
No matter how strong your SEO strategy is, your SEM ad may not always appear in search engines, even if your keywords are a great fit. That’s because other brands may have bid more for the specific keywords. So, money does play a role in securing a good position on SERPs. It makes sense that large corporations usually beat small businesses in the auction game since their budgets are bigger. Still, it’s not time to get disappointed, since money isn’t the only factor.
The Importance Of The Quality Score
Search engine marketing intelligence relies heavily on your ad’s quality score. It’s not simply about how much money you’re willing to throw into your search engine advertisements but how good your keywords, copy, and landing pages are. Quality score, also known as ad rank, indicates the position your SEM ad will appear in. It evaluates you on a scale from 1 to 10 based on how relevant your ad is to your target audience and how informative and captivating your landing pages are. That’s why you may want to focus on effective copywriting tips to improve your copy talent, attract the right audiences, and boost your search engine marketing ad’s quality score. As a result, not only is your ad position favored, but you also enjoy efficient ROI since you generate qualified leads.
7 Steps To Create A Search Engine Marketing Strategy
1. Research Keywords
How are your SEO skills? Are you comfortable doing some basic keyword research? Tools like Ahrefs and Google’s Keyword Planner make it easy to check keyword rankings. This way, you can focus on high-quality and relevant keywords your audience uses a lot in their search queries. You don’t want a keyword’s search volume to be too high, as the cost will increase too. But you don’t want it to be too low, either. PPC strategies try to identify the intent behind users’ keywords. Are they using these words and phrases when they want to buy something or when they simply want to receive information?
Depending on your budget, your search engine ads should include keywords with enough purchase intent. In case your resources are abundant, you can also invest in words and phrases that are very loosely connected to your products and services and have lower chances of generating new leads.
2. Set Up PPC Campaigns
SEM PPC campaigns usually comprise subsets of ad groups, which are then divided into individual ads. To keep your ads organized, you should tie each product and its corresponding ad with specific outcomes and objectives. If your budget is limited, pick longtail keywords that may have a lower search volume but offer precise intent. Additionally, to ensure PPC success, you may create up to four sitelinks to include under the original SEM ads. Adding sitelinks to branded keyword ads increases your chances of getting targeted clicks. Lastly, don’t forget to include your contact details in your PPC campaigns so prospects can call or message you to discuss a potential collaboration.
But that’s not all. PPC directory listings can also boost your search engine marketing intelligence efforts as they work with search engines to improve your ranking. Paid search marketing, display ads—like RoS banner ads and popup banners—affiliate marketing, and social media advertising are the four types of PPC ads you can invest in. Businesses can also leverage PPC directory listing ads as they boost their presence in front of niche audiences that are ready to make a purchase. Free PPC listings are another choice, but they do not guarantee a high position.
3. Create Compelling Copy
PPC search engine marketing relies on top-quality copy that entices and engages audiences. Direct response copywriting focuses on generating immediate attention and actions from prospects. Basically, the copy should be so targeted and effective that people click on your SEM ad without thinking about it too much. Starting from your headlines, they should match the search intent and your target audience’s needs and desires. Next, your descriptions should include your unique selling point (USP) so potential buyers can understand better what you offer and what they should expect if they click on your ad. Lastly, you may implement ad extensions, including phone numbers, sitelinks, callouts, snippets, and maybe ratings.
Since we’re talking about copywriting, let’s also discuss content. Landing pages can include links to articles and other sorts of content that showcase your thought leadership. This is another area to incorporate your SEO content writing skills and further improve your page’s SERP ranking.
4. Fix Your Account Structure
Someone could say that putting all your keywords in the same basket and creating just one search engine ad would be a good idea. We couldn’t disagree more. Why? Because most of your budget would be wasted due to competitor keywords with high purchase intent while your quality score would plummet. So, your best choice is to structure your account neatly. There are several different ways you can organize your Google Ads campaigns. You can organize them by ad, meaning the copy you’ve written for the keywords you’re targeting, or by keyword, meaning the search queries you’re bidding on. Alternatively, you can organize based on ad group and campaign. The former refers to the similar keywords you’ve grouped by theme, and the latter is about managing ad groups. No matter how you organize your search engine listings, you can track each campaign’s performance in real time.
5. Optimize Landing Pages
One of the most crucial search engine marketing tips is about your landing pages. It doesn’t matter how amazing your PPC campaign ad looks. If your page is disengaging and poorly designed, it won’t drive conversions but instead will have a high bounce rate. Optimizing landing pages isn’t only about design elements, CTAs, and headlines, as we talked earlier. It is also about loading speed, user interface, and your value proposition. You’ll need to test your page to ensure everything works perfectly and your copy boosts conversion rates. This process is a marathon, not a sprint, and it may take you some time to learn from your mistakes and master your approach. Simply track your performance daily and weekly to notice patterns, keywords, and trends that might help you reach your full potential. This way, your quality score and ad rank will improve, and your website will start getting more visits.
6. Manage Your Bids
Not all bidding strategies are effective for your brand. Before you even allocate a budget for your SEM Google ads, you should start your bidding experiments to figure out which strategy works best for you. Most SEM ad testing tools allow you to set your PPC bidding amount manually for the keywords you’re targeting, or they set them for you. However, automatic bidding can be more costly than manual, and small businesses that lack abundant resources should avoid it—in the beginning, at least. Larger businesses can rest assured that automatic bidding will bring increased click-through rates and conversion rates. That’s because they can target high-volume keywords for larger bids and appeal to people ready to purchase.
Once you have tried various bidding strategies, your chosen tool will provide you with data and insights so you can refine your technique. As a result, you’ll know how to cater to specific audience segments, locations, and times. What if you are not comfortable doing all this on your own? You can trust a seasoned content marketing agency with experience in content marketing and SEO and let them take care of your SEM ads.
7. Analyze Your Performance
Search engine marketing intelligence isn’t static, and new tips appear every single day as trends pop up and changes happen. Also, algorithms get updated, and consumer behavior keeps shifting in different directions. Therefore, you must track, analyze, and optimize your search marketing strategy to adapt to the ever-changing landscape. So, if your landing page doesn’t lead to conversions, try to improve your ad quality score so your campaigns don’t drain you. Additionally, you may enforce remarketing to strengthen your brand awareness and ensure your products and unique selling point are remembered by prospects even when they browse through other solutions. If your results are still disheartening, you may want to try out a 360 marketing plan and let your eLearning marketers take care of your content production, ad placements, and online promotions.
Why Is A/B Testing Important For SEM?
Iterative testing, specifically A/B testing, is essential in search engine marketing intelligence so your ad campaign receives a high quality score. As we already mentioned, the quality score is affected by landing pages, among other factors. By creating two different versions of your website and exposing them to different segments of your audience, you can get a clear idea of which one is better. Your landing pages can have small or large differences, such as different CTAs, headlines, images, colors, and buttons. For example, you can add two CTAs with completely different messages, text sizes, and color schemes. Successful landing page optimization means that you elevate your user experience and seamless browsing. This includes mobile view optimization and accessibility features.
When your prospects have a positive experience visiting your SEM landing page, they are more likely to stay there longer and proceed to purchase something. So, your bounce rates decrease, and your conversion rates increase. If you don’t know how to conduct A/B testing, you may use tools like Optimizely Web Experimentation that offer real-time data and insights.
The Best SEM Tools You Can Leverage For Success
Enough about search engine marketing tips. How can you turn all this information into action with market intelligence tools? HubSpot’s ad tool allows you to track and analyze your click-through rates and conversion rates and also understand how your SEM PPC ads influence your prospects throughout their buyer journey. This way, you know whether your paid search engine ads work and justify your spending. Semrush is another effective tool that helps you conduct keyword analysis, keyword rank tracking, site audits, and overall website analysis. Specifically, you can track longtail keywords’ rankings and how they rank organically, or check which keywords your competitors target and in which locations so you can choose your own wisely.
Another way to improve SEO is to track Google Trends. A search engine marketing strategy should identify which keywords are trending and at which locations so it can implement them in your ad campaigns. This is exactly what Google Trends offers. It shows which keywords receive the most search queries, so you know which ones to avoid. Lastly, WordStream’s Google Ads performance grader audits your search engine marketing account to identify areas that require your attention. It lets you know where you waste resources, the severity of your ad’s quality score, your poor click-through rates, and negative keyword usage.
Key Takeaway
Many professionals think that creating and promoting search engine marketing ads is easy. However, PPC for LMS companies and other types of businesses is demanding and requires a winning bidding strategy that enters an ad auction dynamically and gives you a high-quality score. Search engine marketing intelligence allows you to analyze the keywords your competitors use and how their ads perform. This way, you can make informed decisions and possibly avoid high-volume keywords others already bid a lot of money on.
To create an effective SEM strategy, you need to identify the keywords you want to bid for and why they are the perfect fit for your budget and target audience. Once you fix your campaign structure, you can start crafting PPC ads featuring captivating copy, including headlines and descriptions. Don’t forget to optimize your landing pages so they boost conversions and implement A/B testing to ensure your pages are engaging. Last but not least, analyze your PPC campaign’s performance and optimize depending on the areas that require improvement. There are many tools that can help you analyze various keywords you are interested in and find those that give you the best chance at creating an intriguing ad campaign.
