If you enjoyed our riffing on Confucius, you’ll love what’s next. Ladies and Gentlemen, Sir Winston Churchill will now address your needs for Search Engine Marketing!
Amazed that a man whose heyday was several decades before there was an Internet has so much to say on the topic? This will take four installments:
- “To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.”
- “Continuous effort – not strength or intelligence – is the key to unlocking our potential. “
- “We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.”
- “However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.”
Today, #4:
We know a guy who works in the restaurant business whose entire strategy comes down to one phrase: “Inspect, don’t expect.” There’s an SEM equivalent: Check Your Results.
Traffic comes from many sources. Don’t you want to know from where, and which of your efforts are paying off (the question was rhetorical; of course you do!)? Think for a moment about the many ways site promotion happens. Here’s a quick list:
- Websites
- SEO
- Off-page factors (linking strategies)
- More comprehensive SEM activities (Adwords, Pay-Per-Click, etc.)
- Blogging
- Newsletters and direct email
- Other offline marketing
We have techniques to measure ALL of these—yes, there are even tricks to measure your web traffic from offline marketing!
Beyond measuring where your website traffic originates, you’ll want to keep track of a few important things:
Conversion: What’s conversion? Conversion is when a visitor is CONVERTED into something more. It could be a direct sale, a viable lead, a client, an appointment, or even something as simple as an entry on your mailing list.
Aggregation: A fancy word that in SEM terms means traffic origination measurement combined with and compared against conversions to figure out what return you get from each source of traffic.
Fine Tuning: The complexity of what we do at CDLLC starts to creep in here, but here’s one simple concept —SEM takes time, both because it’s a cumulative process and because you need to resist the temptation to cut corners by altering many variables simultaneously. Change one variable at a time and wait for results. Changing too many things at once as you pursue SEM Nirvana removes your ability to identify the changes that lead to positive results.
And you thought this was easy. It is: Just contact us, and we’ll do the rest . . .
-Crockett Dunn
Owner CDLLC
-Jeff Yablon
Chief Operating Office, CDLLC
President
Answer Guy Central Business Support Services