Every website owner, whose site has an SEM campaign driving traffic to it, worries about whether or not the campaign is being done properly.  Our first thought on this issue is that if you are considering contacting a new or different SEM company to run your campaign, it’s probably not being run properly.

Professionally done SEM works. Period. And how can it miss? It can cause your website to appear on page 1 of the search results, when your potential customers are actually searching for the products or services you offer. You can’t beat that type of advertising.

We would take a good Google Adwords campaign over a Super Bowl ad! WHY? Because a good Adwords campaign, will always be reaching customers who were definitely looking what you offer.  You cannot miss reaching your target. With a TV ad, you have to hope and pray that a significant amount of the viewers, were in the market for a plumber, accountant, wedding gown, or whatever it is that you do or sell. And in the case of the Super Bowl, you’re “hoping and praying” at 1 million dollars per minute! Imagine the amount of targeted website traffic you’d get on Google, with a million dollar spend!              

So what are some of the signs that you should consider switching search engine marketing companies (or if you’re doing it yourself, let pro's do it).

1 - The company that you have doing SEM is charging hundreds (or even thousands) of dollars PER MONTH, in an ongoing, recurring manner. There is absolutely no reason to be paying recurring monthly fees that are hundreds or thousands of dollars per month! We offer a recurring payment plans to create, run, and manage your SEM campaigns, for as little as $89.50 per month! And our flat rate LIFETIME TRAFFIC plans, are even cheaper!

We can tell you, that the true heavy lifting of building and creating a top notch Adwords (or Yahoo-Bing campaign) happens in the first month or so, after you hire the SEM company. That is when we need to do extensive keyword research, write your ads, create you ad groups, set your bids, and ”move the chairs around the deck” constantly, to quickly determine what’s going to work, and what’s not. After that month, your campaign gets easier to run, and maintain.

After the first month the campaign starts doing its thing on “auto-pilot”.  It would be nothing short of robbery for an SEM company to continue to charge you top dollar, repeatedly, once your campaign is in that “machine like” state.  

2 - The company you’ve hired, limits you to coming up on Google for a small number of keywords and phrases. Sometimes as few as 50 words (or less)!

A good Adwords company will start your account with tons of keywords and phrases. We might even start your campaign with as many as 2,000 of them!  Then over time, we may reduce the number of keywords, so that the campaign is focused on the ones that work in converting traffic for you.  

Search engine marketing companies that limit your keywords, or charge you by the word/phrase, are doing you a disservice.

3 – You’re paying dollars per click, as opposed to CENTS.

Adwords (and Yahoo-Bing sponsored search) in our experience usually do not have to cost dollars per click! In fact, if done right, you’re likely going to pay anywhere from .50 all the way DOWN to .10 cents per click. And that even holds up if you’re in a highly competitive category.

We once worked with a client who was paying above $10.00 per click on Google Adwords, when he came to us. Within a day, we had his campaign at under $1.00 per click. He could not at all understand how we did that.  And his cost per click went way down from there! Because $1 a click is way too high also! Eventually we had him, in his extremely competitive category, paying less than .40 cents per click!     

The worst outcomes with SEM usually happen when a website owner decides to handle the running of their campaign, on their own. In those cases, the campaign is usually being run even more poorly than the overpriced SEM companies would have done.

Understand this… SEM campaign management is not for the average person to do (unless they want to lose a ton of money). And SEM campaign management should not involve very high costs and limitations, like the ones described in this article.

RealSearchResults.com runs Google Adwords, Yahoo-Bing sponsored search PPC campaigns, and CPV/PPV campaigns for websites of all sizes.

RealSearchResults.com also specializes in running CPV/PPV campaigns for affiliate sites

RealSearchResults.com does FREE consultations in response to customer inquiries.