Crafting a search engine marketing (SEM) campaign can be quite the arduous task. You have to consider who you're targeting, whether you're selling an individual product or the business itself and, of course, how you can stay within budgetary constraints. However, with so much to consider, you may be glossing over one of the most important components of a campaign to generate SEM leads: local keywords.

Crafting an SEM campaign is a lot of work, and it can be frustrating when a well-thought-out strategy isn't generating the leads you expected it to. However, by taking a step back and reevaluating some of your campaign's core components, you can get back on track without completely going back to the drawing board.

Whether your campaign has only been running for a few weeks or is well-established, these are three mistakes that you could be making right now.

Your Keywords Are Too Popular

When you first begin crafting your SEM campaign, you'll probably do a little research and find keywords that will help searchers connect with your business. Although this is a great place to start, it's easy to forget that competitors may very well be crafting their campaigns using the exact same keywords you are.

Though online shopping allows consumers to make purchases while they're still wearing bunny slippers, surprising data was unveiled in early 2015 that showed the vast majority of consumers prefer to shop in store at least some of the time. PricewaterhouseCoopers reports that many consumers still shop at physical stores once a week, with only 27 percent shopping online weekly. However, even though consumers are willing to show up at a store, marketers have to give them a reason to do so. Fortunately, paid search marketing can help your business accomplish this task.

When marketers talk about SEO metrics, there's one overarching goal in mind: gaining a higher page rank for Web content. The process of accomplishing this task is multifaceted and ever-changing. The Huffington Post notes that link building, key topic research, meta-tagging and a host of other variables are used to optimize a website for the search engine algorithms that organize search result orders, and these tasks can be complex and time-consuming.

For organizations primarily focused on driving traffic from search queries, page rank is a critical SEO metric — for many, it is the most important measurement of a campaign's success. However, driving additional website traffic should be the primary focus. High-volume traffic and search exposure aren't the only opportunities provided through SEO, which means other metrics can be useful in evaluating SEO success — particularly if your SEO campaigns have additional goals. Here are three SEO metrics you might want to follow to get a clearer picture of your digital performance.

The Internet may be an ever-changing sea of information, but content that is posted online never really disappears. If you're not paying attention, negative content about your business can float to the top. Fortunately, there are reputation management best practices that you can use to promote positive content and push negative content out of the crucial first page of search engine results.

You can't make negative content disappear completely from the Web, but knowing how to manage it goes a long way toward ensuring that users searching for information about your business find the information you want them to see.