Even for brands generating great traffic from organic channels, search engine marketing remains a high-value outlet for reeling in valuable prospects. SEM leads excel at generating sales leads and likely conversions. More so than even organic traffic, SEM has the power to find you quality leads at a high clip and cultivate a steady stream of high-interest consumers.

But when it comes to paid search, lead generation is only as good as the targeting methods used to identify and attract those consumers. As SEM Rush points out, the quality of a lead depends on the mechanics of your targeting strategy, which include the abilities to target through keywords, filter an audience through various criteria and deliver a relevant landing page. In a perfect world, the components of a paid search campaign work together to single out the highest-value traffic and lead it to your online assets.

Because of this, optimization is crucial. Here are some essential steps to optimize your SEM strategy for lead generation.

When it comes to search engine marketing (SEM), keyword strategy remains essential. Social media and other digital marketing channels may provide streams of traffic and referrals, but paid search depends on key phrases to effectively target consumers, drive website traffic and generate conversions.

Long-tail keywords may seem like an unnecessary refinement due to a potentially narrow scope, which can make targeting seem too limited to add value, but this perspective overlooks one fundamental truth of the Internet. Many users from all over the world are running Google searches on a constant basis, and some are using specific phrases as they search. Long-tail keywords focus on a select niche, but this niche has strong volume for your prospective targets.

If you're new to the concept of long-tail keywords or aren't sure how to use them for SEM, here's a quick primer.

Conversion metrics are a crucial part of any search engine marketing (SEM) campaign. SEM can put your offerings in front of customers as they're searching for them. But if you aren't measuring visitor actions, you don't really know what's working.

You can track many different conversion metrics — online sales, phone calls, app downloads, in-app actions, new leads and in-store purchases to name a few. Inc. even shares a helpful list of 11 Web analytics tools to help develop a strategy for optimizing your campaign according to your business goals. You should develop a strategy that includes knowing what behaviors you want to encourage of your visitors once they land on your site, but this will vary according your campaign goals and even the business you're in.

The ability to drive phone calls through your online presence gives you a valuable tool for bridging the gap between traditional and digital marketing channels. But consumer paths to conversion are generally not neat and clean, and they rarely occur through the same channel. Call tracking helps you determine which of your campaigns for driving phone calls are the most successful.

While driving phone calls is great, you can learn so much more when you also have access to information about how well your efforts are going, whether you're getting a good return on your investment and how you can improve on your campaign or plan future strategies. Call tracking is easy to implement, but you need to take certain steps to effectively manage phone call referrals and gather data on their success. Here are a few strategies to make call tracking work with your digital marketing campaigns.

Marketing experts agree that local search factors are becoming increasingly important to search ranking results. Take Google's announcement, as noted in Think With Google, that "near me" searches have increased 34 times since 2011 and nearly doubled since last year.

You have likely diligently designed your website to highlight what you believe are the key components: geo-relevant content, business hours, and your business's name, address and phone number (NAP). But if you have multiple business locations, how are you managing your local listings? Despite your best efforts, as Search Engine Land points out, factors ranging from nondiscoverable location pages to NAP inconsistencies can cause you not to show up in local search. With that in mind, here are six key factors to help you get strong local visibility for all of your business locations.

Optimizing PPC campaigns for the changing seasons is a great way to generate traffic. But if you want to take advantage of all the possibilities seasonal ads offer, you need to understand that seasonality goes beyond winter, spring, summer, fall and holidays — and bid accordingly. Of course, as Capterra notes, conversion rates vary, but a 2 percent rate is typical with any thoughtfully executed campaign. But optimizing your PPC campaign for seasonality, Search Engine Watch explains, could bring your numbers much higher.

Mine Your Own Data

While you might have to wait a bit in order to gauge the results of search engine marketing and other types of campaigns, you can monitor and adjust most PPC ads within hours, which is ideal for responding to changing audience behavior. Of course preparing for the recurring seasons is important, but changes also can occur on a monthly, weekly or even daily basis. This is where your own sales history is key.

In order for a business to be successful in today's digital world, it has to have a strong online presence. In fact, according to Entrepreneur, 2.5 billion people log onto the Internet every day. This constant activity provides online marketers with a multitude of opportunities to attract new potential customers. Here are some tips for getting found online.

Content Strategy

Whether you own a dog walking service, a coffee bar or a gym, a solid content marketing strategy plays an important role in your company's online presence. By providing valuable, targeted content, you can naturally boost your search engine rankings. Furthermore, you can establish yourself as a trusted resource and a leader in your field, which will help you attract new potential customers.

Summer is the season for baseball, America's favorite pastime. This beloved sport has left an indelible mark on American culture. Similarly, social media has had a major impact on American society and the world as a whole. Its influence even extends to baseball itself, as teams use social media to foster connections with fans and provide them with a better game experience.

But the similarities between baseball and social media aren't merely limited to the influence of these activities on our daily lives. In many ways, the actions and rhythms that define a successful social media marketing campaign are similar to the patterns that exist in a baseball game. Here are three parallels to keep in mind.

In order for your company to be as successful as possible, you must constantly strive to improve your search engine rankings. By doing so, you can expand your reach and increase your traffic. Google and other search engine platforms wield incredible value as outlets for both organic and paid search.

The Differences Between SEO and SEM

Many marketers understand that both search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) serve an important purpose in their efforts to reach potential customers. But SEO and SEM, for all of their apparent similarities, can have very different functions and results. The most basic difference is that SEM requires a form of payment, while SEO is free. In addition, SEM offers high visibility and search result prominence, while SEO is more fluid and natural in how it provides results. Even the timeliness of generating ROI are very different: While SEM can turn around results immediately, SEO takes time, patience and diligence to pay off.

When it comes to keyword best practices, the main rule is that the rules are always changing. However, the idea that user experience is king still resonates, and that's where the main conundrum lies: What makes a good user experience is a concept that search engines continue to refine and redefine, which explains why, even with paid search marketing, a top position is not guaranteed. There is no magic bullet to get a higher search ranking, but you can do your best to stay on top of the game with these keyword best practices.

1. Go With the Flow

Companies have always tried to influence consumers who are already prospects, and with the widespread availability of information available to consumers on the Internet, the ability to make those connections is much stronger. Google points out that your keywords should reflect the different queries that could help someone find your site when they're searching. Think of your keywords as your customers' verbalization of the problems they're trying to solve, and create content around relevant answers. For example, if you sell women's evening shoes, posts about trends in evening wear will draw a wider range of prospects and give you more options for keywords.