One of the advantages of paid advertising is the ability to show up in the search results and through display channels very quickly. Thus, unlike SEO, paid advertising makes it possible to get virtually immediate traffic to a website.

In most cases, an effective Search Engine Optimization program requires a greater upfront investment.  However, the long-term benefits can exceed those of paid advertising in that, as soon as a paid advertising campaign is turned off, your site will no longer display in the search engines and receive traffic. 

Paid advertising gives you the ability to monitor and adjust your ad spend on a consistent basis.  Conversely, a successful SEO strategy gives you the ability to “own” organic real estate over time.  Please note though, SEO is often referred to as a “moving target”.  SEO requires constant attention and effort.  Whether it is blogging, submitting articles, link building or being active in Social Media, Search Engine Optimization needs to be tended to by an individual or team of individuals in order to be successful.  

In conclusion, most profitable online marketers are heavily involved with both SEO & SEM.  As a result, they benefit from receiving consistent traffic to their website, while meticulously working to garner better positions for important keywords in the Natural results.

While it seems like summer is still in full swing and fall is still around the corner, the holiday season will be here sooner than you realize it. Before the fall weeks quickly fly by, it would be ideal to take time now to plan for the upcoming online holiday shopping season.  Here are some recommendations on how to successfully plan your search engine marketing (SEM) campaigns.

• Check past campaign performance.  Do some research and see what keywords, ads and landing pages lead to the most amount of conversions. Additionally, what could have performed better? Taking the time to analyze your 2010 holiday campaigns will help you pinpoint the parts of your campaigns that need to be optimized and what you can re-use for this holiday season.
• Budget your advertising spend. Does your product or service have a long purchase cycle? If so, you may want to maintain a steady budget throughout November and December. If not, you may want to ramp up your budget early-on, when customers begin their shopping expeditions.
• Plan your Promotions Now. Do you plan on offering varied discounts throughout the online shopping season or will your promotions stay the same from when the holiday shopping season kicks off on Black Friday? 
• Target Different Devices. With the emergence of smartphones and tablets, more and more shoppers are using these new devices to shop and conduct price comparisons. Plus, these shoppers can be physically in front of a product and still do price comparison shopping.  SEM campaigns now have the ability to target different devices. You can optimize your campaigns for desktop, mobile and even tablet devices.
• Create Landing Pages Now. After putting in all of the time and planning into your holiday SEM campaigns, you would not want all that effort to go to waste if your online visitors land on a less-than-optimal landing page. Design your landing pages with a holiday theme and make sure that your promotions are clearly spelled out.

What happens when someone locks their keys in their car? They have to figure out how to get their keys out of their locked car and it delays them from getting to their destination. Although, it wasn’t intentional, their schedule has been altered. It’s the same way in the internet world.  Companies make changes to their website, move pages, delete pages, but don’t make the corresponding adjustments to their search engine marketing campaigns. It’s an honest mistake, but one that can be costly.

What many companies don’t realize is that they are wasting money when they change their website pages and don’t adjust their search engine marketing campaigns.  Their ads are showing and they are incurring cpc costs, even though their ads are going to an error page.
Think about it. It’s like a restaurant paying for a billboard on a busy interstate that says exit here for food. However, when people exit they end up at an empty building, with no sign that says we’ve moved to a new location. It’s a waste of money. Why pay for a billboard that directs people to the wrong location? 

Another cost factor is losing trust and relevancy among searchers. Searchers don’t enjoy clicking on ads that lead them to an error page. It has no benefit for them. Some companies may remember to put in redirects on their websites that send searchers to the home page of their site, but it’s better to send searchers to a page on your website that is directly related to their keyword search. Although some searchers are persistent, a company can lose credibility if their ads consistently lead to error pages.

Error pages not only leave a bad taste in the searchers mouth, but also in the mouth of search engines. A company’s keywords and ads within their search engine marketing campaign can be disapproved by engines.  This can be hurtful to the quality score and drive up a company’s cpc cost for keywords, which causes the company to incur unnecessary costs.

The solution to avoid costly mistakes is simple.  If there are changes made to your website, especially in the naming of the web page, make sure the corresponding changes are made to your search engine marketing campaign. It is better to pause your campaigns temporarily to confirm that they match your website; than to run them with uncertainty, hoping that everything matches.