Why does your SEM need to be balanced?
Once the SEO web design and e-commerce platforms are finished, search engine marketing is what occupies most of an SEO consultant’s time. There are many aspects and avenues for search engine marketing, and choosing the right channels for your project is almost always a challenge.
In the past, and lately with the social media craze, website owners could focus on one marketing strategy that was viable in its own right, whether it was directory listings, link exchanges, article marketing, social bookmarking, blogging, press releases, ezine marketing, viral marketing, affiliate programs, contextual ads, co-registration, pay-per-click campaigns, local search, banner ads, or video marketing.
Times have changed. It’s a new day for search engine marketing and it’s no longer effective to focus on just one method, particularly if you are just starting a project. With the advent of personalized search on the horizon and the increasing sophistication of search engine algorithms, it is imperative to have a more aggressive and balanced ongoing search engine marketing program. Anyone with less than 4 or 5 of these marketing methods will be seen as imbalanced in the eyes of the search engines… and organic rankings will eventually suffer.
Effective search engine marketing requires consistency. It’s important to be realistic about time and monetary resources when creating a online marketing plan. Search engines love consistency! Small amounts of regularly added content are better than one large content push followed by long periods of inactivity.
Some aspects of search engine marketing take longer to show effectiveness than others. A good SEO consultant uses time wisely to test faster marketing channels while waiting for the organic channels to come up to speed. Balancing the workload is the best way to make progress with search engine marketing in the most efficient way possible.