The 10 Most Universal Mistakes Marketers Make in Search Engine Marketing
By John Tawadros
June 14, 2004
#1: One-Sided Strategy:
Many marketers still believe that a paid-search only strategy or a natural-only SEO strategy constitutes a "complete" SEM campaign. A recent iProspect study showed that 60% of searchers click on the natural search results while only 40% of searchers click on paid ads.
A major online medical journal refused for years to allow Google to spider their archives for fear that it would crash their server. When they finally allowed Google in, their rankings in Google exploded and they received some 200,000 click-throughs on hundreds of new keywords each month.
If you are executing a one-sided strategy and ignoring Google or Yahoo's natural search results, how much traffic are you missing? Similarly, if you are not buying paid search ads, you could be missing a similarly significant portion of your audience.
If your strategy consists of either paid or natural SEM and not both, it's time to expand your campaign to capture your entire searching audience. Every search in your space will introduce a prospective customer to you or to your competitor - time's a wastin'!
#2: Failing To Determine Conversion Values:
Whether your Web site produces leads that are passed along to your sales force or transactions that take place on your Web site, you need to know the value of each conversion on your site if you hope to keep your SEM campaign's ROI in the black.
We see large companies spend thousands monthly on search advertising without understanding the value of their conversions.
If this is you, stop.
Identify each conversion on your Web site. Each conversion matters and can be valued. Maybe it's someone downloading a white paper, signing up for an e- newsletter, perhaps something as innocuous as someone printing out a coupon and determine its value. Some pharmaceutical companies measure the number of search referrals who visit a product indication page and who click on the "print this page" link. They can estimate that some percentage of these individuals printed the page to share it with their doctor and to ask for a prescription.
Only armed with these numbers can you justify your search marketing expenditure, natural or paid, and make it ROI positive.
Even if you don't have perfect confidence in your numbers, you can true them up going forward as you gather more conversion information. What's most important is to identify and track the right metrics.
You could discover, for instance, that one in every 100 people who sign-up for your e- newsletter buy something after receiving a few months of communication. Depending on the average value of those transactions, you can estimate the value of each e-mail newsletter sign-up. Again, your initial estimate doesn't have to be perfect; it just has to be the first step.
#3: Bidding With Your Heart and Not Your Head
As detailed in #2, failing to know the value of each conversion on your site leads to universal mistake #3 - bidding on a keyword(s) in PPC search advertising in excess of its ability to deliver a positive ROI.
We most often see companies do this with branded terms or keywords that they feel define the space they are in. What is most frustrating is that often these keywords sometimes (not always) produce very low conversion rates, and are often so broad that the traffic they draw to the Web site will include as many unqualified clicks as qualified prospective customers.
Know your conversion rate, predict your campaign's conversion rate, and do not allow vanity to drive your bids above your campaign's ability to deliver a positive ROI.
#4: Failing To Control Your SEO Process Internally:
Submitting your Web site to "link farms" (sites that exist to link to other sites) can get your site penalized by some search engines. A well-intentioned Webmaster not familiar with search marketing tries to "help" you by blasting your URL off to these link lists using software he downloaded. Suddenly, your rankings drop and your site is no longer showing up in a major search engine. It happens more than you think.
Educate staff in any department whose "proactive" behavior could harm your results about the tenets of SEM.
