SnapHawk Blog

Acronyms are a favorite tool of those fluent in technobabble. Search Engine Marketing sounds better and more digestible as the three letter term, SEM. Likewise for Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. In reality, these shortened terms do little more than confuse industry outsiders, leaving them drowning in what we call Acronym Soup. Here at SnapHawk, we have sworn off the Soup.

Sure, it’s cool and trendy to toss around these pithy nuggets of tech knowledge, unless of course you don’t know what they mean. Then what’s the point? Thankfully, we’re here to help. The SnapHawk Internet Marketing Glossary offers definitions of the industry’s most commonly used lingo to help users swim, not sink in the Soup.

Being “successful” online is subject to many definitions, but here at SnapHawk we know that most business owners want to see a monetary payoff. This payoff can come through a variety of channels depending on the goal you’ve set. Perhaps the aim is to get a customer to make a purchase through your e-commerce site or maybe you want visitors to sign up for an e-mail newsletter. Whatever the goal, one thing is clear: potential customers need to not only land on your web page, but they need to stay on your web page.

One of the crucial fundamentals to Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is implementing an effective strategy for optimizing your keywords.  An effective keyword strategy will help your Web site appear near the top of the results page when your potential customers are searching for a product or service that you can provide.  Here are five basic keyword strategies that will have a huge impact in helping potential customers find your Web site when they need to.

1)    Use Google’s Keyword Tool. This tool allows you to analyze competition and get an idea of the cost-per-click (CPC).  It also gives you the opportunity to find highly-searched keywords or phrases that have little competition.

When someone clicks your ad on Google, you only have a few precious seconds before he or she hits that back button and continues searching elsewhere.  To ensure that web-surfers stay on your website rather than go to your competitors, your landing page has to be engaging, simple, and easy to navigate.  Below are some quick tips to help ensure that surfers will be converted into customers.

1)    Fulfill your ad promise – An ad is like a promise.  If the information the user expected when he or she clicked your ad isn’t present, they are going to feel frustrated and deceived, and quickly navigate away from your site.

The analytic capability now possible for measuring online behavior is astounding, and it’s only going to get better.  Amazingly, we are only in the infancy period of what is actually going to be feasible with website analytics in the future.  Even now, analytics enables smart business decisions and advertising that is more relevant, targeted, and cost efficient than anything in marketing history.  With all of the powerful tools available, though, it’s easy to become overwhelmed by the amount of data that’s out there. 

Mark Jeffery’s Data-Driven Marketing gives techniques to simplify this abundant data with 15 metrics.  Five of these easy-to-understand metrics are directly related to search engine marketing (SEM), and can help you determine which strategies are effective and which are allowing you to lose money.  Of course there are other metrics out there, but Jeffery’s are important to consider in the ongoing evolution of website analytics, and are relatively simple and easy to apply.   Below is a brief overview of how each metric can work for you.