Search engine marketing is the art of promoting websites by increasing their visibility in search engines using SEO techniques, PPC, contextual advertising and more. What makes search marketing different is the fact that you do not search for customers. They search for you. You know it based upon the prospects search query, so the targeting is clear. Converting online visitors into buyers is the key to any profitable business. It doesn’t matter how much traffic you’re getting to your site; if you’re not converting that traffic into revenue, you won’t make it in business for long.

Here are a four proven tactics to strengthen your search marketing efforts:

1. Don’t Just Create – Market Your Content.

Even major search engines cannot make the difference between quality content and hype, so it automatically cannot make great pieces of writing, art or multimedia visible. Only we as humans can discover, react, comment and link to fantastic content on the web. So, it is only natural that great content cannot simply be created and left for visitors to find. You must market it. Placing your website in “sponsored sites” or link building through article marketing and guest posting is the best way to market your content and get noticed directly by the audience.

2. Know How Your Customers Find You.

The way your readers find you changes with the speed of thought, as the splinternet fragments content access and customer experiences due to mobile device proliferation and password-protected content. It’s important how you choose to place your brand in their way and it depends on how they engage with the search engines and devices. Until it will be possible to track consumers across devices, you can use options like purchase path analysis and linguistic profiling.

3. Identify Your Visitor’s Needs.

Understanding your customers and their needs and truly seeing where they are coming from during the buying process is essential to your overall conversion strategy. Also, invest in your website. Keep in mind that usability is more important than aesthetics, but at the same time aesthetics are essential too.

4. Optimize Across A Customer’s Conversion Process.

Your basic conversion rate is equal to the total number of people that visit your site in a certain time period divided by the total number of orders for that same period. So, if you receive 5,000 visitors in one month and you get 100 orders in that month, then your conversion rate is = 100/5000 = 2%. Optimizing your conversion rate includes monitoring, testing, listening, asking and improving through every step in the marketing process: prospect -> lead -> visitor -> subscriber -> customer -> brand advocate, etc. Once you optimized your customer’s conversion process, you’ll enjoy the benefits of gaining more customers month after month and year after year.

Summary

Support your search marketing efforts with a lot of practice because the only way to learn what really works for your site is by trying new approaches. Making it easier for the search engines to crawl your site is essential for attracting more visitors.