The Small Business Owner’s Handbook to Search Engine Marketing

Small and medium-sized businesses often compete against giants with massive budgets in the digital landscape. The good news is that Search Engine Marketing (SEM) can level the playing field. In 2024, as algorithmic sophistication grows and competition becomes more intense, here’s how you can use SEM strategies to stand toe-to-toe with big businesses.

search marketing

Understand Your Audience

Before you delve into SEM, it’s crucial to understand your target audience. Employ tools like Google Analytics and customer surveys to identify your audience’s demographics, preferences, and online behavior. Knowing your audience’s intent can help you make informed keyword choices and ad placements.

Strategic Keyword Selection

Big businesses often go after broad, high-traffic keywords, leaving many long-tail keywords that need to be utilized.…

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Reach the Right Customers with These Search Marketing Tips

Through strategic outreach programmes and carefully tailored content, small businesses can begin to make their online presence felt and climb up the search engine rankings in a process known as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

Search engine marketing (SEM)

Search marketing enables you to optimise your website to attract the your target audience. As many as 59% of small businesses predict that over a quarter of their revenue will be generated online in the next five years, making search marketing is increasingly important.

But diving in at the deep end and expecting to float is never a good way to begin any venture. Digital marketing experts take years to master and perfect their craft, learning exactly which keywords to target and focus on at any given time.…

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Utilising Search to Start and Grow Your Business

As a search marketer for over ten years and CEO, I decided last year to start my own business and have Google to thanks for it’s success to this day. Here are a few key insights to help any CEO or business owner looking to start their own business online.

search marketing

Align Your Business To Search Behaviour

One of the first marketing 101 lessons at any school is that the pathway to success in 99% of cases is to meet an existing ‘need’. Google has the perfect free tool called the keyword planner which can help you understand what people are searching for and therefore the most popular sets of ‘needs’ in society.…

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Why I Finally Said Goodbye To Organic Traffic

As a small business owner in the online niche, I have to make a confession: I’ve gamed Google for too long, often unintentionally – so long that, eventually, I reap what I sow.

You see, I own and run sites. Starting up 5-6 years ago, I didn’t really care about search engine ranking. At that time, I know a thing or two about SEO, but I have no interest in getting my ranking up.

Why I Finally Said Goodbye to Organic Traffic

I was initially not really into blogging. But I tried it anyway and started a blog, Noobpreneur.com, mainly to document my online entrepreneurship journey.

The first thing I tried to make my mark in online business was starting up an e-commerce site selling natural treatment products.…

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Publicity for Publicity’s Sake

Internet marketing can be tough. You would need to have an effective strategy in place depending on what stage your business is in. The competition is fierce as everyone vies to take the top spot on search engine results.

online business publicity

There is a saying that bad publicity is still publicity and this is one line in marketing that reputable businesses should never cross. Take the case of the DecorMyEyes scandal. In a gist, the owner of this online eye wear business uses negative customer reviews to be on the top echelon in Google search.

It is a well-known fact that to be in the coveted top spot on search engines, you would need to have high page rank sites link to your site.…

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5 Free Tools to Boost Your Online Marketing Results

online marketing toolsThe 2009 business world is competitive, and consumer expectations are high. As costs rise and marketing budgets shrink, small businesses are looking for ways to improve their ROI with every dollar spent.

While many businesses have realized search engine marketing is a smart way to grow a business, some launch a website, start-up a PPC campaign, or invest in professional SEO, and neglect to spend time optimizing their efforts, leading to low conversion rates to less than stellar search engine rankings.

The good news? A variety of tools are available to help you boost your online marketing results. Here is a breakdown of five of the best to help you get started.…

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