Tips, Tricks, and Trends: How to up your Search Engine Marketing game
April 17, 2018
You know that Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is a cornerstone of an effective digital marketing campaign. Simply investing in SEM is a start, but how can you keep up with the latest trends that help you reach your ideal target audience?
Let’s be real: The primary search engine used is Google, so we will keep our focus there for the sake of this post (although Bing has a lot of cool stuff going on as well!). Google is continuously improving their platforms, including AdWords, DoubleClick, and Analytics, to help businesses connect with consumers. Algorithms are updated to provide searchers with the most relevant information they’re looking for, and your ad strategy should evolve to keep up with these changes. For example:
Expanded Text: Helping You Rise Above the Competition
The higher character count of Google’s Expanded Text Ads offers businesses several advantages. Your brand messaging grows stronger with additional content—more characters means you can be more conversational when incorporating keywords. Because expanded ads are longer, they tend to push other ads further down the screen. Investing in SEM means that your ads may have the opportunity to appear at the top of the page and be viewed by searchers before pages that organically appear on the list. Our SEM experts have updated thousands of our clients’ ads in the last year to meet the new standard of expanded text, and have seen that expanded ads are delivering consistently higher click-through rates. Have you upgraded your ads to give consumers a better brand experience?
Accelerated Mobile Page: The “Speed Racer” of Mobile Search
When you’re on the go and searching on your phone, you may have seen results with a tiny lightning bolt symbol and the letters “AMP”. Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) load faster, giving them a huge advantage. During the Google Marketing Next Live Stream, multiple speakers emphasized that time is of the essence—a one second delay in mobile page load can decrease conversions by 20%. Another stat from Google’s stream stated that 53% of all site visits are abandoned if a mobile page takes longer than three seconds to load. Ensuring your site has a speedy load time and exploring opportunities like AMP will help you reach more consumers with a more optimized experience.
What does this mean to you? SEM is all about providing the potential traveler the right information at the right time. Improving your website so that it loads quickly—regardless of the device used—will help your site become even more appealing to consumers and, in turn, you’ll reap the benefits of lower click costs and higher ad positions. Meanwhile, taking advantage of the increased space available for your ads gives you new opportunities to entice searchers to click to your page rather than a competitor’s.
