SEO Warrior

Chapter 16. Search Engine Marketing

You can use search engine marketing (SEM) platforms to benchmark your SEO efforts. This chapter is a brief overview of two important Google SEM platforms: Google AdWords and Google AdSense.

Google AdWords is the number one SEM platform on the Internet today, and is the subject of many books. Although we cannot cover every single detail of AdWords in this chapter, we will spend some time on the most important features of the platform.

Google AdSense is the extended arm of AdWords. Whereas you can use AdWords to test, validate, and improve your keyword research, you can use AdSense to earn income from Google by showing contextual ads. You can also use AdSense ads on your target web pages to see whether relevant ads will show up to further validate your targeted keywords.

We’ll start this chapter by covering the major SEM players and the basics of the pay-per-click (PPC) paradigm. We’ll talk about the factors and variables influencing visitor conversion, and the associated conversion rate. We’ll also discuss common PPC terminology.

Before we discuss AdWords in detail, we’ll cover the fundamentals of the SEM process. Our coverage of AdWords includes basic campaigns, ad groups, and ad setup. In between, we’ll cover the important topics of keyword match types, including broad match, phrase match, exact match, and negative match.

We’ll also spend some time discussing AdWords testing, including A/B testing and multivariate testing, which can help you increase ...