Search Engine Marketing: A Look Behind the Curtain

Search Engine Marketing presentation at the Business Marketing Association in August 2013 luncheon, Houston Chapter:

What goes on with Search Engine Marketing?

There is a lot of depth and detail to Search Engine Marketing. Despite the complexity, success with Search Engine Marketing can be achieved if basic core principles are followed.

In Houston on August 15,2013, I was invited to present a 40 minute overview of search engine marketing to over 100 fellow professional Houston area B2B marketers at the Houston Business Marketing Association's Luncheon for a "Look Behind the Curtain on Search Engine Marketing" (SEM), at the Courtyard-on-St. James Place in Houston.

During the luncheon I shared my 10+ years of success and experience with SEM and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and provided a look into how I and others have developed and exploited international search engine marketing strategies and tactics to drive significant, sustained, organic growth and strategic outsourcing and acquisition opportunities.

If you've wanted to learn more about Search Engine Marketing from an actual (fanatical) practitioner, this short, useful, and informative luncheon presentation can help motivate you to start using SEM, get better at SEM, inspire increased usage of SEM, and re-inspire you to improve and expand current SEM efforts.

Download the Search Engine Marketing presentation. (.pdf)

Learn more about the Houston BMA Search Engine Marketing luncheon.

Join the BMA Houston Chapter.

Search Engine Marketing: Behind the Curtain

Meet Your USA Adwords Competition: All 1,500,000 of them.

Google ads used by 1.5M US marketers, websites.
Google's Internet advertising network attracts more than 1.5 million US marketers, websites.  

Associated Press, Tuesday May 25, 2010 

So, now you know. A lot of people are using Adwords in the USA for lead generation, sales and branding. And many of them want the same search terms you want.

With Adwords and other paid search tools like BING, your real competition isn't just your real direct and indirect competitors for goods and services in your markets. Not at all. When it comes to paid search, especially Adwords, your ads appear and compete in a vast, virtual universe where competition for your search terms and keywords can be intense and costly.

Companies in entirely different markets with completely different target audiences can target the same keywords you want. For example, the search term "Lab" can mean many different things - - R&D laboratory, clinical laboratory, math class, puppy dog, etc.? Very broad terms, if used, mean that you'll compete against many others and attract many clicks from casual or confused visitors who will not be your customers.

This ad 'clutter' and 'noise' can frustrate your efforts to reach your audience, unless you take intelligent steps to focus on your market niches and filter out the rest. There are many resources to help you acheive this and reduce or even eliminate competition for money-making search terms. These include using negative search terms, long-tail search phrases, avoiding search terms that are too broad, use of technical vocabulary, selective ad showing by schedule, location and language, analytics and more.