Last week I became Individually Certified with Google AdWords. One of the reasons I felt motivated to gain this in-depth knowledge of Google AdWords was to help affiliates that I work with gain insights into SEM and learn easy steps to upload and maintain profitable PPC campaigns for their websites.

If you want to make money from your website you have to grow your audience. You need people to click through links on your site and make purchases. The more eyes on your site, the better your chances are of making referrals to products or services for a commission. But, a lot of traffic to your site doesn’t necessarily mean that those consumers will click through and convert. You need qualified traffic – people who are interested in what your website is about, interested in the products you are promoting. Growing your audience through search engine marketing is fast, it’s fairly easy and it’s the most qualified traffic you can get (if you do it right!).

With this in mind, here are 5 tips to consider when implementing your SEM strategy:

1. Define Your Ad Groups. You need to break your keywords into various lists and upload them into separate Ad Groups in your campaign. This is important when it comes to understanding what categories work well for you and also makes optimization easier. Your Ad Groups should make sense with your website, possibly by product type or if you have only one product maybe various product features/uses. Ad Groups should represent very specific aspects of your website.
2. Keyword Research and List Building. Once you have your Ad Groups defined start building a list of keywords for each group. Try to pinpoint your top ten keywords per group and then use a keyword tool to refine the list, add keywords, create negative keywords, create strategy of what match type to use for each keyword.  Your keyword list should be a work in progress, you will want to make tweaks and changes and constantly optimize as you get results when your campaign is live.
3. Create Compelling Ad Text. Do some research, plug in some of your keywords into the search engines and see what ads appear. What does your competition look like? This is crucial to know because you want to see what appears to be working for your top competitors, but you also want to be sure to differentiate your ads in some way, make them stand out. Can you add a compelling call to action to your text? If you are promoting products on sale for a limited time make sure to call this out in your ad, give the audience a sense of urgency so that they feel the need to click through and make their purchase now.
4. Optimize Your Landing Pages. It sounds simple, and it is…but make sure you do it! Be sure that your landing page for each ad matches the ad specifically. If someone searching for a specific kind of camera comes across your ad and clicks through and that exact camera is not on the page they click through to, chances are good that you lost that customer within ten seconds. Make your ads as specific as possible and then have a corresponding landing page that matches your ad exactly, this will give you the most chance for a conversion once you get that click.
5. Create Unique Content Regularly. Search engines track how often you update your site content and search for the most relevant match to a query. Keeping your site content updated on a regular basis with unique content not only will improve your quality score, but it also improves your natural search engine rankings, which are FREE!

I hope that you find these tips helpful in your pursuit to drive more qualified traffic to your website.  Please leave a comment if you would like a follow-up post with more detailed content on any one of these points, or any other SEM topics!