Different SEM Strategies for Different Sites
One thing I realized pretty quickly when I started doing SEM work is that different sites require different strategies. Tactics that work on one site may not work so well on another site. Each site is different so you need to create custom strategies to get the best results.
Here are 3 examples to illustrate my point.
1. Image Optimization
Right now I help manage a celebrity gossip site. It’s very different from the other sites I’ve worked with because the vast majority of the site’s traffic doesn’t come from traditional search engines like Google. Instead, it gets most of its traffic from image search engines.
The celebrity and entertainment industry is all about pictures and images, so our team makes sure each page has a catchy picture that will cause people to click through.
Also, we normally use Google Analytics but it doesn’t show the keywords people use in image searches. We switched our analytics program to Pmetrics because that program shows the image search keywords.
For other sites, you may not need to know the keywords from image searches. For instance, I used to do consulting for a lawyer blog. As you can imagine, that site barely got any traffic from image searches. I never had to worry about doing SEO for the image search engines.
2. Keyword Research
I have a gaming blog in a relatively small niche. Keyword research is very effective because the other sites in the niche don’t know about SEO. They don’t build links and they don’t do keyword research. Therefore, it’s simple process to rank well. I do basic keyword research and then I insert the keywords in strategic places like the title tags.
Compare that blog to a geek blog I help run. Geek topics like tech and gadgets have a ton of competition. The industry is very saturated and many geek webmasters and bloggers know about SEO. Therefore, it’s very hard to rank for the common keywords that you find on keyword tools.
For that blog, we focus on creating a lot of unique content instead of doing keyword research. Our time is better spent producing as much content as possible to rank for many long tail keywords. We’re doing well with this strategy. We recently reached 10,000 indexed pages on Google and those pages send a lot of search traffic.
3. Social Media Sites
Social media marketing is usually time consuming so it makes sense to be picky with the sites you choose to promote on.
For the geek blog, we tried getting traffic from popular sites like Delicious, Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon. We found that StumbleUpon was by far the most responsive site. So, we lowered our efforts on the other sites and focused on StumbleUpon.
For my gaming blog, the target audience is way behind on the social media trends. There is not a big presence on popular sites like Twitter and Facebook. But I knew in this online age that they had to be hanging out somewhere so I kept digging.
I found an old but very active forum devoted to the game. I focused my efforts there and I’ve seen good results. The forum is great place to promote since they let you link to your own content within forum posts. If I had only looked at the mainstream social media sites, I would’ve missed out on this great traffic source.
Figuring Out The Best Strategies
If different sites require different strategies, how can you figure out the best SEM tactics for each site?
An in-depth answer will have to be a topic of another blog post but I’ll leave a few quick tips.
Test, test, test. Testing different strategies allows you to compare them and figure out the best ones. Once you have a good sample size of testing results, continue to do what works and stop doing what doesn’t work.
Monitor relevant stats so you can tell which tactics are working.
If you’re doing social media marketing, discover the place where your audience hangs out. For example, try searching for common keywords in your niche at different social media sites and see if there is a lot of activity. Don’t automatically assume that your audience is participating in the mainstream sites.
This article was written by Dee Barizo who is part of the marketing team at Celebrific, a popular celebrity gossip blog. His main responsibilities are link building and keyword research.
Along with the SEO work for Celebrific, Dee writes about blogging and SEO at Performancing and BloggingPro. He also does SEO consulting on the side whenever he has free time. Dee lives in San Antonio, Texas.
