Search Engine Marketing and Optimization

The SEMSEO cycle

Undoubtedly at this point many of you are wondering about the key piece of information I left out of the above analysis: the cost per click (or, translated to the end of the process, the cost per customer). If all of those clicks cost the same amount, let’s say, 20¢ per click, what would that mean? Well, it would mean that each customer acquired through the paddling lessons campaign would have cost $2.87, and each customer acquired through the canoeing lessons campaign would have cost $6.67. If each lesson was one hour, and the instruction was $30/hour, thats a difference between a 10% marketing budget and a 22% marketing budget — quite a big difference, actually. So, was tripling the business worth doubling the marketing budget?

Ultimately, that depends on the nature of the individual business. But remember, in this example, we’re talking about an initial SEM campaign. Spending that money up-front on SEM would have taught this business that by focusing the SEO on canoeing lessons instead of paddling lessons, the number of customers could have been approximately tripled, and the cost of the optimization is incrementally zero.

This is why, instead of thinking about pure SEO or pure SEM, I like to think about the SEMSEO cycle. By spending a little bit of money up front on SEM, the business owner in our example was able to see that by changing his mind about the focus keywords for optimization, he could triple his business. Then, of course, the next step is to “fix” the conversion rate for these more popular keywords. Once this preliminary optimization is complete, another SEM campaign can be implemented to see if he can’t get that cost per customer for the SEM canoeing and kayaking campaigns down closer to the cost per customer in the original paddling campaign. This becomes a continual cycle: test quickly through SEM, optimize for the preferred result through SEO, repeat. Once you’re past the point of diminishing returns on this optimization cycle, it’s time to take the lessons you’ve learned and start applying them to your other marketing efforts (which, of course, is the topic of future posts).

Conclusion

So, what have you learned? Well, hopefully you’ve learned that

  • SEO is easier than you think, but only makes sense in the context of keywords
  • SEM is a quick and inexpensive way to learn which keywords are best for your business
  • When done properly, you cycle back and forth through SEM and SEO techniques, to get the most customers at the lowest cost-per-customer possible

If you liked this article, please post it to your favorite site through the links below; and don’t forget to check back soon for the rest of this series. And, as always, if you have any questions, feel free to leave them in the comments section below or email me directly.

Cheers!

Chris

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