360i's chief strategist helps you get the most out of your search marketing efforts.

As marketers are looking to elevate the performance of their search marketing campaigns, here are five quick ways to help push your search campaign to the next level.

1. Integrate all your Search Marketing initiatives

We have found that integrating search marketing programs helps companies truly maximize their investments and gain complete control over all relevant search real estate.

In today's ever-competitive search marketing landscape, the leading companies dominate the search marketing results through carefully integrated strategies to achieve greater market share and related revenue. Companies can no longer rely solely on paid placement campaigns at the exclusion of natural search engine optimization and vice versa. The programs need to address all relevant search marketing opportunities and deliver a truly integrated strategy as related to budget allocation, keyword selection, and campaign analytics.

The impact of a well-executed search marketing program includes multiple listings within the search results, increase in traffic, and a multiplier effect on campaign revenue. By having more listings on a page, companies can push competitors off the first page and minimize consumers' choice to their benefit. 

2. Use competitive research to learn from your competition

Competitive research gives you an edge on your search marketing competition by providing a birds-eye view into their online businesses -- which search engines drive traffic, which search terms produce the best results, and where there may be missed opportunities. Then, by putting this information into action, you are able to quickly expand keyword lists, test new placements, and build category market share.

Our firm uses third-party, licensed research provided by Hitwise's Real-time Competitive Intelligence when developing campaign strategies. Hitwise tracks over 10 million users within the United States and provides real-time insights into how these users are finding your competitors' sites -- which keywords and search engines are driving their business, and information on how you stack up relative to your competition in terms of market share, percent of traffic from search, site that are driving traffic, and other valuable insights.

This information can then be used to expand keyword lists, site content, and media placements specific to these terms to achieve greater search marketing results. 

3. Use sophisticated campaign-optimization tactics

In JupiterResearch's 2005 SEM Executive Survey, Jupiter revealed that only 16 percent of search marketers are using sophisticated campaign strategies. Thus, there exists a significant opportunity for most search marketers to improve their campaign performance by using some more sophisticated campaign optimization tactics. Some of the tactics that can help improve campaign performance are:

1. Expand the keyword list. Most sophisticated search marketers have 10,000+ keywords in their search marketing campaigns. Having a large number of keywords helps to increase overall market share and enables you to reach the consumers when they are making their buy decisions.
2. A/B copy testing. By making changes to the keyword copy, you are able to improve clickthrough rates and page conversions. Also, by taking advantage of special offers in the copy, the "Official Site" designation, and other seasonal promotions, you are able to drive clickthroughs and conversions.
3. Landing-page optimization. Optimize your landing pages by testing multivariable page elements to increase page conversions. By improving landing-page conversion, you are able to maximize the click value.
4. Integration of search with offline plans. By integrating your search marketing plans with other offline plans you are able to synch up multichannel marketing efforts. For example, you should make sure that your search marketing campaigns are synched up with catalogue drops, TV campaigns, and other offline promotions that drive online sales. 
5. Portfolio optimization. Most marketers manage their campaigns manually, which leads to campaign inefficiencies. Using sophisticated statistical modeling and algorithms can help produce abnormal returns and maximize the overall return on advertising investment.

4. Make sure your site analytics system is configured for SEM

By configuring your site analytics tool to properly track natural search engine optimization, paid placement and all other related search marketing tactics, companies can easily measure and elevate the performance of their search marketing campaigns. We typically find that companies have not configured their site analytics systems correctly, which inhibits their ability to track and truly optimize campaign performance.

So, the first step to great search marketing results is to make sure that your site-side analytics system is properly installed. As basic as this may sound, many of the largest companies on the web have made significant investments in analytics tools such as Omniture, CoreMetrics, and others, without having configured these tools correctly to track the performance of their search marketing programs accurately.

5. Take advantage of vertical search placement opportunities

Vertical search engines are one of the fastest growing areas on the web. It is important to include vertical search as a part of your search marketing initiative to generate incremental performance from these highly relevant sources. As an example, shopping engines such as Froogle.com, Shopping.com, BizRate.com and others are of key importance to retailers, and sites such as Business.com and KnowledgeStorm.com are of key importance for business-to-business companies. 

By obtaining listings in these major vertical search engines, you can achieve additional results through the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and others. Additionally, learning from these vertical campaigns will be critical to building your competency in this rapidly growing search marketing niche. 

The search marketing landscape is changing rapidly, with competition increasing daily. To thrive in this new market place, it is critical to continue to test new media placements, use industry-leading tools and research, and always be looking for ways to one-up the competition.

Dave Williams is Chief Strategist and Co-Founder of 360i Search.

Mr. Williams oversees the strategic direction of the agency, advises clients on search engine marketing strategies and maintains strategic and industry relationships. He is recognized as one of the nation's leading experts in online media and search marketing.

Mr. Williams is a regular speaker at JupiterEvents' Search Engine Strategies, ad:tech, Direct Marketers Association (DMA), eTail, and Shop.org, in addition to speaking at many Atlanta organizations including Atlanta Interactive Marketing Association's (AiMA), The Interactive Media Association (TIMA), SouthEast Regional Internet Society (SERIS), Emory University's Business School, and the Creative Club on the topics of interactive media, online creative and search engine strategies. He currently serves on the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) Board of Directors, Interactive Advertising Bureau's (IAB) Search Engine Marketing Committee, and AiMA Board of Directors. AiMA recognized him with the "Dottie Com" Award as Interactive Marketer of the Year in 2000, and in 2004, awarded him a lifetime membership for his significant contributions to the organization's success.
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Prior to co-founding 360i, Mr. Williams was an Internet Strategy Consultant with IBM Global Services and was a CPA with Price Waterhouse, LLP. Mr. Williams earned a Master of Business Administration from Emory's Goizueta Business School and a bachelor's degree in business administration and accounting from Washington and Lee University.