Your SEM Competitive Advantage
So what does it take to win the SEM war against your competition? Extensive keywords lists? Award winning creative? Clairvoyant bid management system?
Keyword lists, creative and bidding technology are all fairly well understood and relatively easy to deploy. So, if this is the case, what is to stop your SEM strategy deteriorating into a bidding war against your competitors where the choice is to either buy traffic at a level that is not profitable or have your ad pushed down into obscurity?
Christmas Online Marketing Count Down!
Christmas is a boom time for retailers and not even the dim economic outlook will be able to hold back the hoards of shoppers as the Christmas deadline approaches. So you may ask, where does the internet fit into a retailers marketing strategy?
As we know, people use the internet to research goods before finally buying online or in many cases offline. So when is the best time to start and ramp up your online marketing activities?
As we can see from Google Search Insights the serious demand starts to pick up in October and accelerates right up until two weeks before Christmas where it levels off before coming to an abrupt stop as you would expect. This means that November often has the highest overall traffic volume for Christmas gifts.
Real Estate Trends – Search Insights
Google has recently launched a new service called “Search Insights”. As with most Google services this product is free and very powerful. Search Insights allows you to research the popularity of search terms over time and by region. Different time periods or regions can also be compared side by side. It should be noted that the traffic numbers and regional demand are all normalised and so if you want to find specific search volume numbers in each region you should use Google’s Keyword Tool.
As someone who has just listed their house for sale, I wanted to examine the long term trend in “real estate” related searches to see how this year’s down turn in the housing market is reflected in people searching for real estate.
The two graphs below show the last four years of search demand for “real estate”. The second graph shows each year side by side and it does not take a rocket scientist to determine that I should have sold my house last year!
Search Engine Bootcamp
Thursday July 3
SEARCH ENGINE BOOTCAMP – AUCKLAND
9:35 Fundamentals of Paid Search, Jon Ostler – First Rate
Jon Ostler and Dave Underwood will be speaking at the Search Engine Bootcamp, a one-day Search Engine Marketing seminar, designed to maximise knowledge on a wide range of search engine marketing techniques, ranging from how to build a search engine friendly website to understanding what options are available for pay per click search advertising.
Site Content Review & Copywriting
“The right site content is essential for site stickiness, conversion and search engine traffic “The findings of the site business strategy, competitor analysis and market research will drive new site content production. Information based pages will be added to the site presenting high demand information to the search engines and users.