This is a guest post, courtesy of Adam Steele, the founder of Loganix, a popular SEO fulfillment company located in beautiful Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
Search engine marketing (SEM) is an expense that you should consider necessary if you own and plan to expand a startup. The focus of SEM is your presence on search engines — whether and how high up you can be found when customers search for your brand name, your products or your services. Here are five reasons why investing in SEM should be a crucial part of your short and long-term goals.
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Table of Contents
Search engines are what most people use to purchase
Most sales start online. Most consumers find their next product by searching for information, reviews and competing options online, even if they plan to buy in a store. That means SEM needs to be a basis of your marketing efforts. You’ll still want to focus on some traditional marketing by running ads and generation press, but expect that most people who find you will discover you through a search engine.
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People who don’t know what they’re looking for can still find you
Search engines developed into such powerful tools for consumers for a reason: finding a product or service didn’t take knowing its name. Just by searching for associated keywords, consumers find products all over the world that might have a good chance at solving their problems. If you want your startup to be a solution, you need to make sure searchers have the same chance at finding you.
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It will help you measure your exposure to the marketplace
Marketing on search engines is a good way to find out how much visibility you have to the rest of the world, and how popular your brand is relative to your competitors. Your position on search engines is roughly correlated to where you stand in the minds of consumers. Changes in your position can tell you if a marketing campaign has been really effective, if a news item really landed or if a promotional event was really worth it.
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The data you gather tells you more about the behavior of your consumers
SEM usually starts with a study of keywords. Keywords are no longer simply stuffed in like they were in earlier days, but it’s still important to know which terms consumers associate with certain products. Doing this research for your SEM campaign will help you understand the language you should also use for your packaging, ads and other public-facing content.
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It creates a foundation for future marketing and promotion
Once you have a commanding position on search engines, you can use that to empower every other marketing effort that follows — even the ones that aren’t online. Take advantage of a high position to launch new products, cross-promote new businesses and more effectively handle public relations issues.
Start Early
SEM is an expense that you should make sure to invest in as early as you can in the life of your company. It’s not necessary to pay anyone for the early steps. As long as you do the keyword research yourself — and make sure to include the right ones in your content as you develop it — you’ll have a foundation you can build on for years.
About the Author:
Adam Steele is a builder of things, including agency and link building solution, Loganix, internet marketing agency The Magistrate, and among others, a Referral Spam Cleanup tool. He is always looking for a new hustle, and eager to help others with their marketing and business-related questions.
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