I decided to start an “SEM for Dummies” style series to help teach SEM novices how to build, develop, and optimize a viable paid search campaign, without all the boring, obvious, and typically unnecessary prattle you’d get in a webinar or multi-day conference. If you think the place to start is the keywords or even the landing page then you are very, very wrong.

The first step of any good campaign is to figure out the goal: what is your action point?  Are you trying to get email subscriptions, make a sale, find a lead, qualify a lead, generate page views, or serve a branding purpose?  Once you can answer that question, then and only then can you start figuring out how to draw people to your site.

You need an idea of where you’ll be landing your searches – a landing page, home page, microsite, or store page.  You’ll develop the page later, but you need to know what question your page is answering.  Search is a conversation – the query is the question and your page is the answer.  What are you answering, how are you answering, and what can you do to make sure that you have fully participated in the conversation? These are all pieces of your goal, ways of drawing people to your desired action point.

Before you draw up a list of keywords, before you play with ad copy, and before you test you must know what your goal is.  You may have more than one goal, in which case you will want to separate them into individual campaigns.  Specificity is key.  If a client wants you to build a paid search campaign for them, you should know everything about the goal, their vision, and your vision before you go to the next step: keywords.