What Makes a Good Search Marketer?
Despite the fact that we’ve been living with and working on the Internet for years, immersing ourselves in all the new technology that has come and gone, this immeasurable resource has only really been around 10 years at the most. I forget that sometimes, thinking instead that this thing has been around forever. Like a microwave, a television, a cell phone.
Internet Marketing has absolutely been as dynamic as the digital landscape where it exists, changing with every passing year to be more intuitive, more streamlined, more efficient. For years now, those of us in the Search Engine Marketing industry have been taking business away from traditional sources of media advertising like magazines, newspapers and direct mail. We’ve been stealing their thunder, and with the internets ability to glean very specific information from each and every visitor, we’re probably going to keep that thunder.
But how do you know if you’re good at what you do? Everyone is happy to talk about what it’s like to be an SEM, or compare vague statistics with no real usable information. Determining what is good for a given statistic isn’t easy when the target number changes depending on the industry and level of competition.
So how do you know if you’re good at Search Engine Marketing? How do you know if you’ve got what it takes to take the next step in your career? Here are a few areas you can start with:
Is Internet Marketing Fun?
Do you like the internet? I mean, do you like it like it? To make it as an SEM you’ve got to have a commanding knowledge of the internet, how to use search engines to get information fast, how the internet has changed, and is changing the way the world works. In this business it literally pays to be involved in the medium. It’s the medium and the source.
Do You LOVE to Research?
Keyword research. Industry research. Trends research. Bids analysis. Split testing. Should I continue? There are two areas in Search Engine Marketing: creative and analytical. If you don’t mind spending hours or days (weekends?) pouring over statistics to find information as specific as you can get, and if you love reading resource after resource to get acquainted with a new industry or subject matter just so you can turn around and write about it, then you get a big thumbs up.
What About the Creative?
The Search Marketing Trifecta just isn’t complete without the creative! If I’m using Twitter as a sort of polling mechanism (and I am), then SEMs in the industry just LOVE to talk. We call it branding. We like to show off how clever we are, how informative we can be, how dynamic our thought processes are when we’ve had one cup too much coffee. It’s really kind of silly when you think about it that way, but we’re really not that vapid. A good Search Engine Marketer is an artist with the written language. We have a strong command over our vocabulary, we understand that it’s not only what the ad says, but in many cases how the ad is formatted that draws negative or positive emotion.
These suggestions above are just that, my suggestions. If you don’t have a basic interest in the above, then you’re probably going to find the work to be tedious, boring and totally pointless. If you DO have a fundamental curiosity about the above, then you’re probably going to lose track of time and lose 20 pounds as you fall head first into the rabbit hole that is Search Engine Marketing. Good luck!
