Search Engine Marketing Services

Another great service that you can offer your client is search engine marketing or SEM for short. SEM involves advertising on the search engines themselves. When you do a search with any of the popular search engines of today, you will notice that the results are divided up into the natural and sponsored sections. The natural listings are accomplished through SEO whereas the paid results are done with search engine marketing or pay per click (PPC.)

The way it works is pretty straightforward. If you are a local plumber in Atlanta, GA, you can bid on the keyword "Atlanta Plumber." Whenever a potential customer does a search on that keyword, the advertisement for your company will be displayed. Most search engines have places for ten sponsored results. The placement of your ad is based on the money bid on the keyword and an internal quality score determined by the search engine.

Many local businesses have no idea how to setup a SEM campaign or just think they don't have the time to manage it. This is a great opportunity for you to provide a great service and get some very measurable results. The first step is to determine the monthly budget for the campaign. In your question and answer session you will have discovered the lifetime value of a customer. This value will give you a good idea of how much to spend per customer acquisition.

Once you have the monthly budget it is time to setup the ad campaign. One of the most important settings for the campaign will be the geo targeting. This will allow the ad to be displayed when someone in Atlanta is searching for a plumber. It would be no good if the ad was displayed when someone in New York was searching for a plumber.

After the targeting is setup then it will be time to enter a list of keywords. Make sure that only relevant keywords are selected. If a plumber is bidding on "landscaping service" then the ad will most likely not be displayed and if it is displayed it won't be clicked. This will affect the quality score and cause the bid price to be raised.

Now that the list of keywords have been entered, it is time to write the ad. There are three parts to the ad, the headline, body, and display url. The headline should have the keyword in it, so that it will show bold in the results page. Make sure to have a call to action in the body, something like "call today" or "make your appointment now." This will increase the chances that a potential customer will click the ad. The display url is just the address for the website.

Finally it is time to make the campaign live. After it goes live, it is important to monitor the click through rate and conversions for the ad. After all this is what you are being paid for. Sometimes you can partner with a SEM firm and outsource the work. The best part of SEM is that you get quick results and can show your client exactly what kind of results they are getting.

Next we will see yet another service to provide for your local business clients.