Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Outsourcing SEM Staff Can Save You Thousands Per Month

By Darron Skinner-Martin


This internet is a huge industry with US$9.4 billion being spent on search engine marketing in 2006 in North America alone. Do you think this figure has increased or decreased since 2006? Does anybody actually go to your site? Do you want to increase your traffic and sales?

Thanks to the web you have a global market place at your disposal. Almost anything can be bought and sold over the internet. With the huge profits available the competitiveness has increased significantly. Quite simply, if you want your business to be at the top of Google the use of SEM staff is essential. Offshore SEM staff give your business access to some of the best talent available at a price all businesses can afford. The SEM staff are able to increase your search engine rankings by natural processes (this takes time) or they can increase it by paying for advertisements through places like Google. If done poorly, SEM can cost you a fortune with almost no result.

The most common form of search engine marketing (SEM) is the use of pay per click (PPC) advertising. Basically you pay a fee every time someone clicks on your ad. To advertise on search engines using PPC can be very time consuming and expensive. There are a number of factors which determine the PPC price including the keywords and relevance to your site as well as the fee you are prepared to pay. As you can imagine everyone wants to be at the top of search engines. As there is only a few spots at the top of search engines people are prepared to pay high fees. Some of these can be upwards of $11 per click. This is pretty dear for one click. Imagine 10 clicks or 20 clicks per day and no sales. Without the use of SEM staff this could become a very expensive advertising campaign. Outsourcing SEM staff will save you money on advertising as well as the time you need to spend to maximize your advertising dollar.

SEM staff and experts use PPC advertising through search engines. If you do a search on Google you will see a number of sponsored links at the top and down the side of the page. These people have paid to have their company on the first page. If you were to click on one of the ads that company would actually pay a fee to Google. In order for that company to get a return on their investment (ROI) they will need to generate a certain amount of sales from the advertisements. This can be a fine line if you are paying high PPC fees. One way to beat this is to be very specific about the words you want. For example if we searched "SEM staff" we may get the word cheaper for "offshore SEM staff" or simply the person is actually searching and is already interested in offshore SEM staff. This means you may be more likely to generate a sale off perhaps a cheaper word.

Think about your product or service and all the words you could use to describe what your business does. Think of spelling mistakes, plurals, capital letters and words like what is, how does, where to and much much more. If you put all these words together there would be thousands of combinations. You have probably thought of less than 5% of the possible keywords. SEM staff are able to do all of this at a reduced price saving you time, money and angst.

How would you like your business to be advertised on related sites across the web? This is possible with PPC advertising. People will show your ads and when they are clicked on you will pay the fee you bid for. This SEM strategy needs to be used with expertise as you do not want your ads on sites with very little relevance to your products and services. An offshore SEM staff member is able to find the relevant websites to advertise on so you are able to save money and create more business.

As you can see search engine marketing is a science. What you have read here is only the tip of the iceberg in regards to SEM. If you have the time and money to learn then you will create much more business. However, if you are not interested in SEM or just don't have the time then outsourcing offshore SEM staff may be an option. This will also allow you to concentrate on the key components of your business such as the actual selling/creation of your products.

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