Why Businesses Fail at Search Engine Marketing

When set up correctly and closely managed, Google Adwords can be an excellent way to market your business online. In fact, “93% of online experiences begin with a search engine”. Ensuring your business is visible on the first page of Google should be an SEM focus for every business.

Google claims that adwords is the easiest and best way for your customers to find your business online. But if it is so simple, why are so many businesses still failing at it and spending thousands in the process?

Let’s take a look.

What is SEM?

Put simply, Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is a form of Internet marketing that involves the promotion of websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs) primarily through paid advertising such as Google Ads.

Why Businesses Fail at AdWords

Succeeding with an AdWords campaign requires a number of factors to come together to ensure your business is seeing a quality return on its investment. Here are just a few reasons why your Google Ads campaign is falling short of expectations:

1. Failure to evaluate

The basis of any good AdWords campaign revolves around analytics. In fact, according to Hubspot, companies that track their inbound marketing analytics are 17x more likely to see a positive ROI than companies without good analytics in place. This is because businesses are able to intervene early when marketing methods aren’t working, rather than running a campaign to its completion and not realising until the end that campaign failed.

It makes sense right? You can’t improve if you don’t know whether or not something is working!

The problem is, only 57.7% of AdWords accounts actually have tracking set up for their site and campaigns.

2. Inattention

Adwords is not a simple plug-and-play system that will automatically market your business to the top of page 1. If you set 30 keywords, one campaign and then never return, your campaign will fail- and fast. Online marketing requires flexibility and dynamic action. Google algorithms change often and the way your pages rank can change dramatically overnight. Stay on top of Google rollouts and be prepared to move with them.

3. Unrealistic expectations

Don’t expect to dominate every search engine for every product or service you offer overnight. Be prepared to need a lot of patience and make sure you are setting realistic objectives for your campaigns. Ideally, you should be trying to achieve your success incrementally.
Optimize for one product or service, and after you’ve achieved this success, move onto the next product or service and so on.

Keep in mind that a successful SEO strategy requires longevity. Set your business up to play long-term and your results will be more steady and consistent.

4. Choosing the wrong keywords

Ideally, you will have hired an agency or marketing professional to manage your campaign. Their selection of keywords will be based on extensive research, such as how your target audience searches, what terms they are likely to use and how to best position your service or product where it can be seen.

So, if you’ve selected your own keywords based on what you “think” your customers might, perhaps, be searching, without actually verifying this with real data, it’s highly likely that your campaign is not using the right keywords.

To remedy this, analyze keyword data using a reputable keyword research tool. Find out which keywords your (successful) competitors are using. Then make sure you’re optimized correctly.

There are many considerations when building your Adwords campaign and as you can see, each can have a significant impact on the outcome. Be sure to understand what you are trying to achieve from the outset. Set attainable goals, analyse your keyword data and evaluate the results using real, measurable metrics. More time spent planning is the key to ensuring steady results for your business across all of the products and services you offer.