Canadian Marketing Blog

Search Engine Marketing for Beginners

In my current role at a home and auto insurance company, we sell our products exclusively through independent brokers. That said, we are keenly interested in providing value add services to our broker partners to ensure they are both growing and retaining the right customers.

Like many businesses today, brokerages know they need to have an online presence but often lack the technical know-how. As a result, our marketing department has put together a series of marketing best practices for our brokerages to help them get started. To compliment Jim Estill’s blog post here late last month, SEO - Search Engine Optimization Basics , I thought I would share one such piece that attempts to demystify Search Engine Marketing. In our Introduction to Search Engine Marketing we tried to simplify SEM and provide some tangible tips for businesses trying to get started in the SEM space.

What SEM strategies and tactics have worked for your business, and which have not?

Martha Turner, AVP Marketing Services and Campaign Management, Aviva Canada Inc.
& member of CMA’s Direct Marketing Council

Martha,
be interested in your thoughts about key word versus phrase search terms. it seems to me that consumers are increasingly asking questions of google..."Where do I find xxxx", "Who is the best deal on YYY"
as opposed to the firehose of mixed relevancy from single or dual word search terms...adwords not withstanding

and while on the topic...what about social search integration
do you see this as Google's Achilles heel?

cheers

Miro

I found this article about putting a "social spin" on SEO that I thought I would share called "Let Social Media Help your SEO" (link below)

Just learning about SEO myself, I was interested in its point that too many marketers think that social campaigns obviate the need for an SEO strategy, writes Norm Elrod. He argues, social and SEO work best when they're used together: By monitoring social buzz, it's possible to find trending keywords that regular SEO strategies would overlook. "Tomorrow's keywords are out there to be found, courtesy of social media," Elrod writes. "And when they become today's, you'll be well-positioned to receive all the traffic."

http://smartblogs.com/socialmedia/2010/03/05/let-social-media-help-your-seo/