Create a Search Enging Marketing Plan, and drive more natural traffic to your site

In order to make your site more visibly on Google and other search engines, you need to create a Search Engine Marketing plan. Here are the steps you need to take to start laying out the basic structure of your plan.

Define your goals. What does a successful search engine marketing plan mean to you? This can range from increasing the number of page views, to converting visitors into clients, to increasing your brand recognition online. Remember to make your goals measurable, specific, and realistic.

Define your niche. What sets you apart from all your competition on the internet? What do you offer that is unique? Why should the average searcher, who has a 4 to 7 second attention span, stop and take the time to explore YOUR website? This is important to identify, because it will affect the keywords and phrases you will choose to focus on in your campaign.

Define your target audience. Evaluate what location(s) you are marketing to, what your visitor values, what they are searching for, and in what format. This helps you make decisions about how to strategically structure your website to meet their needs. For instance, if your average visitor is not so tech-savvy, the last thing you want to do is to confuse them with unclear navigation and flashy widgets.

Research your competition. Pick some keywords and phrases, type them into Google, and see where your competition comes up. Google Adwords and Wordtracker are some great keyword suggestions tools. In the end, be sure to select keywords with lower competition! Popular words such as “computers” drive tons of traffic, but there are also a ton of websites competing to be at the top of Google for them. Don’t waste your time. The key is to go for a less popular phrase with lower competition that still drives a fair amount of traffic.

Develop a strategy. Now that you’ve done your homework, you can begin to decide what tactics to use in your marketing plan, keeping your budget in mind, of course. Some ideas include: search engine optimization of your web pages, a pay per click campaign, improving usability, creating multiple websites, adding new features like RSS feeds and blogs, and using social networking/bookmarking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Digg, and MySpace to your advantage. Depending on your audience, you could also give online press releases, podcasting, and videos a try!

Track and analyze. There are many tools on the market used to Analyze site traffic and user behavior patterns. The most common tools used in the Advertising Industry are Omniture, WebTrends, and Web Position Gold. However, these tools carry a premium for use, and are not practical for the use of smaller business or personal sites. I recommend the use of Google Analytics to help get you started learning about the power of gathering site traffic data. The relevant information to use from Google Analytics is the unique page views, page bounce rates, and the source of your site traffic each month. By looking at this data, you can see if visitors came from search engines or referring site, the keywords used to find you, and how long they are on your site and pages. All this information should give you a good gauge of whether you are improving or not.

Remember, you should always be testing out different techniques and evaluating their effectiveness. This is known as A/B testing, and we will get into that more. Other techniques to utilize as well are optimizing your website and links to make them more search friendly – also known as SEO (Search Engine Optimization), a pay per click advertising campaign, and using social networking and blogging to help increase your site content relevancey. A website should be thought of just like a tangible product sold in a store; whereas the product is developed, promoted, and then marketed and sold to consumers.