How to Avoid Common Search Engine Marketing Mistakes

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New search engine marketers often commit very common mistakes. To run a successful campaign, these search engine marketing mistakes should be avoided.

Everyone makes mistakes. Unfortunately search engine marketing mistakes can typically be expensive and annoying ordeals. From misplaced media buys to flat out terrible marketing decisions, a small mistake can often be the make-or-break factor for an online marketing campaign, potential product, or service business.

However, while online marketing mistakes can occasionally be a major nuisance, they can also be a great learning experience. The internet gives search engine marketers the ability to pinpoint the parts of their online campaigns that are highly effective, and it also gives them the ability to pinpoint aspects of their marketing campaigns that are highly ineffective.

This makes mistakes very easy to identify, and even easier to reverse. Learning from experiences, at least as a search engine marketer, can actually be a very simple process. They can simply reverse engineer what is failing in their online campaigns and keep an eye on their tracking software. However, it is never good to see search engine marketers make the same mistakes, which is why the four most common mistakes are listed below along with the solution for each.

Being Too Nice to Prospective Customers in Search Engines

It is nice to hold customers by the hand and welcome them to an online business, but it is also nice to land a sale occasionally. The internet is full of shady characters and aggressive search engine marketers, and if click-through rates are anything to go by, the most aggressive marketers are sometimes the most effective. While it might be tempting to be the nicest advertiser on the block, it can also be a destructive and ineffective strategy.

Targeting the Wrong Keywords for SEO and Pay-per-Click Advertisements

Sometimes the most sensible keywords are the least effective for direct sales. For example, an office furniture retailer would expect that “office furniture” would be the key phrase to target. In reality, the best keywords are often those that are not ultra-obvious, but are very sales-oriented. Rather than bidding on major keywords like “office furniture,” search engine marketers should place bids on “buy office chairs,” “purchase office furniture,” and other buy-related keywords.

Bidding for Too Many Keywords as a Search Engine Marketing Solution

Every keyword comes with a suggested bid price, but those can often be inflated or inaccurate for some advertisers. When pay-per-click advertisements are achieving high quality scores and click-through rates, it is often possible to bid significantly below the suggested price and still receive thousands of impressions daily. Search engine marketers should not be afraid to experiment with different bidding prices for a small risk could save thousands of dollars annually on pay-per-click advertising campaigns.

Using Search Engine Marketing With the Wrong Intentions

Search marketing is all about intentions. Some searchers are out there looking to buy products, while others are merely interested in researching and comparing products. There are different types of customers out there and identifying their intentions and aligning them with the online business’ intentions is key to capitalizing on a search marketing presence.

Before, during, and after every campaign, search engine marketers should take note of their prospective customers’ intentions, and make sure their pay-per-click advertisements are effectively targeting them.

If an online business is about to invest in search marketing but does not want to fall down the same oh-so-common pitfalls, they should take note of these ultra-frequent errors. The best education is often a guide in what not to do, so marketers should take these anti-strategies for the valuable resource that they are.

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