SEM is no easy task. It requires a thoroughly planned execution strategy and a flawless process to be successful. Depending on the competitiveness of the industry, it might take 6 months to years to achieve substantial results. There are no tricks or magic involved here, just hard work and dedication. There are a lot of roads to take and strategies to implement. However, marketers should not forget the fundamentals of SEM.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization), professionally executed, accomplishes an important piece of a very valuable puzzle towards a truly successful and profitable website marketing strategy. Using strong research for the best keywords, insightful competitive research, onsite and offsite optimization using great content and careful management using sophisticated website statistics are key elements towards high organic rankings for targeted keywords relevant to your business. Being easily found for these highly popular and competitive keywords generates huge amounts of traffic to the website. Although all of this is a great accomplishment, page 1 Google rankings by itself doesn’t put a thin dime into your bank account. So we have reached an important milestone; but now what? How do we generate business from all of this traffic?

Search Engine Marketing is only 50% complete when you start getting visitors to your website in volume due to successfully achieving high rankings for your targeted keywords. You now have visitors … now you need buyers.

If your website has a goal, that is, sales made through an online ecommerce site, lead generation, phone calls, surveys that are completed, then you probably have put some significant effort in time and expense towards winning that client… and it all started with a conversion.

If you have been in business for any length of time, you should probably already know what a big percentage of NEW sales actually come from EXISTING customers.  If you are doing a good job, this is most certainly the case.  This should make sense; customer buys product or uses your service and you have provided the value, and hopefully more, than the client expected.  Important customer-relationship dynamics take hold … trust, confidence, peace of mind and convenience all grow in your favor.

Search Engine Marketing , whether its Organic SEO or PPC , even spectacularly done, is limited to getting searchers to find you and land on your home page, a specific landing page or another internal page that is most relevant to the search performed. It does not equal CONVERSION .

Successful SEO gets the right user to the right page on your website. Now your website must take over from there to grab the attention of the visitor and very quickly … 5 seconds.

For the purposes of this article let’s assume that you have successfully achieved high organic search engine rankings for the right key words through Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts and have also employed paid search (PPC or Pay Per Click ) to more fully maximize traffic to your website. At this point you have a web presence with a site and good search engine optimization results, as well as, paid search management that have paved the way to your site. But now you are not achieving your BUSINESS objectives of increasing SALES AND PROFITABILITY.