SEM Success Tips (Small Business E-commerce Link Digest – 4/3/2009)

SEM Success Tips (Small Business E-commerce Link Digest)

Business may still be tough, but plenty of opportunities exist out there. Paid search is booming and most businesses can benefit from improving their results. Need to get more out of your paid search activities? Read on, Big Thinker, read on…

• Are your search efforts paying off? George Michie at Rimm-Kaufman offers excellent tips for evaluating PPC performance in a down economy.
• One way to improve the value of you PPC activities is to look at expanding the sites you use. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but apparently, companies other than Google offer paid search and evidence indicates Yahoo is actually gaining some share. Huh? Who’d a-thunk it?
• Round up some UN-usual suspects. Not all consumer searches are on traditional search engines. Hitwise has an interesting white paper showing how online classifieds are seeing increased traffic. Can you use those to help your business? I bet you can.
• HubSpot put together a great presentation showing how to turn your website into a “marketing machine.” Corny title aside, they’ve provided some excellent tips, including heat map tracking of Google search engine result pages.
• Of course, improving your ads doesn’t mean your sales will increase. Landing page optimization plays a huge role, too. Copyblogger offers a landing page makeover case study that helped a client who generated traffic but $0 sales.
• I’d mentioned this a few weeks ago, but I still think it’s worth pointing out FOT Linda Bustos’ article pointing out when to use negative exact and negative phrase match.

There are no silver bullets in this economy. But, if you aim in the right direction and check to see where your shots are landing, even plain ol’ ordinary bullets like the ones above can help you hit your targets.

Are you getting enough value out of your small business website?

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