Our Free Search Engine Marketing Guide

Creating a website can be hard work. And how do you get people to your website once it is live? How can you make sure people find you in Google? These are very common questions and the answers do not need to be complicated.

Firstly, make sure you have covered the basics of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) to give yourself the best chance of ranking in Google (and other search engines).

Then, make sure you take advantage of relevant, free tools like Google My Business. This allows you to have a FREE profile on Google if your business has a local presence. This profile can be managed by yourself with the additional of photos and posts and your customers can leave reviews which help other prospective customers to learn about your business. Keep this profile up to date with your contact information, address and business hours so that people using Google Maps can easily find directions to your business.

Next, consider if Search Engine Marketing may be right for you. This is the process of paying to have your ads shown in search engines for keywords that you choose. There are some pretty strong benefits:

1. You have full control over the keywords, ads, budgets, locations your ads are shown, and more!

2. Any changes made to campaigns apply almost instantaneously. So if you need to stop advertising a certain service or product, it's really easy to do.

3. You are getting in front of people who are looking for your business. This takes the guess work out of finding customers. If you deliver flowers in Adelaide and someone is searching for "Flower delivery Adelaide" then you already know they are in the market for your product offering, and you just need to make sure your ad is compelling enough to convince them to buy from you.

4. The performance is very transparent. You can see which searches led to clicks to your website, and whether those clicks to your website convert into leads, phone calls, or online sales, which means you can measure your return on investment.

5. You only pay when someone clicks on your ad. So you only pay for relevant traffic.

Things to be careful of:

1. As a new advertiser it's very easy to sign up to Google Ads, and you generally create what is called a "Smart Campaign". This is easy to create and manage, but I would strongly recommend avoiding this if you want to be able to control and optimise the performance of your campaigns.

2. While you can choose your keywords, Google does try and help you expand your reach by showing your ads for searches that it deems to closely relate to your keywords. If you do not manage your keyword match types and negative keywords well then you can end up paying for irrelevant traffic quite quickly.

3. Think sensibly about your campaign settings. If you only service a local area, then consider just targeting a 10km radius around your location. Or if your phone is not manned 24-7 then set up your call extensions to only show in business hours.

We hope this gets you started with your search engine marketing campaign and helps you to avoid some of the common pitfalls of SEM. If you have any questions or would like a free consult regarding SEM for your business, please get in touch.