Applying Modern Marketing Principles to Search Marketing

A brief overview of how modern marketing principles should be ingrained into a Search Engine Marketing Program. The attention to the following phases will ensure overall marketing goals are acheived and the e-customer is kept at the forefront of planning: Situational Analysis: Begin with a comprehensive site analysis and competitive sweep. Know your industry and the online landscape. Objectives: Work to define specific and measurable goals as they relate to both Search Engine Optimisation, and your broader internet marketing strategy. Strategy: Define your target audience and your customer on-line buying process. Also, identify geographic and preferred search engines and directories, implement an effective link popularity strategy, and define and categorise relevant keywords and phrases, as they relate to key sections of your website. Tools and Tactics: This is where the bulk of the ongoing work takes place. Spend a great deal of time researching relevant keywords, create informative search query specific landing pages. cleaning and optimising your website HTML including meta tags, titles and descriptions. Also, find inbound links that fit with your business. We DO NOT subscribe to link farms and only suggest relevant and authentic inbound links. Once your house is in order its time to invite visitors over. Subscribe and re-subscribe your URL's to search engines and search directories. Control: How are you performing? You must be dying to know. Incorporate scheduled reports detailing results against agreed performance metrics, interpret the results and feed them back into the program. Once one cycle has been completed, this is usually 4-6 months, start over again. This time you hit the ground running and focus on re-optimising the program and maintaining your website relevancy for both your e-customer and Search Engines.