#1 SEM Strategy: Consider local search.
Local businesses account for 46 per cent of Google searches. So, whether you sell products or provide services locally, the SEM campaign is another opportunity to be discovered.
Include your place in the text of your ad, as well as its headline, and don’t forget to mention the audience – it should live in your location and search from it.
Since so many rules are intertwined here, our ultimate guide to local SEO will come in handy. For example, consider a method for selecting geo-targeted keywords.
#2 SEM Strategy – Infiltrate your rivals
I’m sure your biggest rivals are using search engine marketing. It’s a great idea to study their campaigns and extract the most useful ideas for your SEM strategy.
Conduct a competitor PPC study to learn about their keywords, bidding techniques, and writing tactics. You’ll be able to equate your advertising efforts with those of your rivals using SEMRush, and SEM tools like SpuFu and iSpionage can give you access to their ad copies (I’ll go over the helpful SEM tools later).
#3 SEM Strategy – Instill a sense of urgency
Since the sense of urgency is a powerful motivator for people to buy, you should incorporate it into your marketing strategy, especially in paid ads.
Add any urgency-inducing works to the headlines of your advertisements, such as “Special Offer – 24 Hours Left” or “Ends when.”
#4 SEM Strategy: Make use of the “Similar Audience” feature.
This Google Adwords feature helps you expose your ads to a community of users who share your audience’s behavioural habits and interests. My recommendation to my clients is that their business purpose is to expand the reach of your top-performing pages and content by targeting new users who have similar characteristics as your site visitors, who are unaware of what they do.
#5 Search Engine Marketing Strategy – Segment and personalise your advertising
As previously reported, Google Adwords provides very customisable settings for personalising and segmenting your ad campaign. For example, you might configure your advertisements so that they only appear to mobile users.
Alternatively, you can segment your users in a more nuanced manner. If you use a Google Adwords custom audience, you can segment your users into those that have recently abandoned a cart and show them a highly customised remarketing ad with a very special deal.
#6 SEM Strategy: Use A/B testing to determine the most effective solution.
A/B testing is a flexible marketing strategy that assists you in determining the best visual/textual solutions for any campaign.
When it comes to paid ad testing, you can first determine which part of the ad you want to test. For example, you can evaluate two different headlines, explanations, extensions, or separate terms such as urgency triggers on a small target audience.
Then, compare the findings to see which phrasing better inspired the experimental audience. Apply the winning version to the remaining members of the audience.
#7 SEM Strategy – Implement Automated Rules
The good news is that it is no longer possible to monitor data and make adjustments to the ad campaign manually. The automated rules in Google Ads allow you to control your account using criteria that you define: display ads on a schedule, bids based on time of day, season, location in search results, and so on.
You can remove the human element in some circumstances by enabling automation in your account. This is particularly true when major changes are required, and nothing can be ignored.
However, before you set automatic rules, double-check that you did everything correctly – otherwise, you risk wasting your budget.
