Pause your SEM spending money immediately. Why? Because there are two things you can do to get your website visitors even cheaper, and then start your spending again. Do these two fairly simple things:

1: Optimize Your Site First

Chance are, as you read this, people are visiting your website and leaving, never to come back. You are wasting your SEM efforts. Why? Because your website probably is not optimized for the visitors' needs. So what can you do to learn what they really want? You can use website analytics tools like Google Analytics to find out where they are going, but in order to find out 'why' they are doing what they are doing, you need to gain customer insight. And how do you do this? There are two main ways.

Firstly, you should survey your website visitors. You should be asking a few important questions, in particular, "What was the reason you came to our site?", "Did you achieve what you came to do?", and "If not, why not?" Gaining this information from your website visitors will arm with you with tremendous ideas for optimizing your website. There are some very cheap tools for surveying- 4Q is Avinash Kaushik's new free survey tool, and SurveyMonkey offers a pretty cheap tool that should meet your needs. This way you can learn exactly what your website visitors are looking for, and gain ideas for improving your website.

Secondly, now you have some ideas to test from your survey, you should begin testing them on your website so you can begin finding out what different things work best on your site. Google Website Optimizer is a great free tool that will help you optimize your website (there are many good posts about how to make best use of this tool).

In a nutshell, if you optimize your website, you will generate more REPEAT visits, because people will have a better experience that matches their needs, and want to come back (bookmarks/direct types). And the best news is that these repeat visits don't cost you a PENNY. What would you rather spend for getting a visitor to come to your site? 30 cents or higher per click, or zero? I know which one I would prefer...

2: Analyze Bounce Rate of Your Keywords

I'm still shocked at the amount of people who just simply set up PPC campaigns blindly and leave them running. Fair enough, they may optimize click through percentage, but they are missing the even bigger picture... what happens when the visitor get to your website after they click on the ad! You may have the best PPC campaign in the world, but if they leave immediately after getting to your website, then you have wasted your PPC money. So what can you do? Look for the bounce rate (the percent of people who leave your site upon entry) of all your keywords.

Then, get rid of the ones that are bouncing the most, and increase spending on the ones that are bouncing the least. Bounce rate is a standard metric in Google Analytics, and it's easy to calculate this in other tools (entry visits/single access visits) This will really help you to optimize your spending on SEM!

So there you have it. Try doing these relatively simple things, and watch how much less money you have to spend in order to attract the same amount of visitors you had before. Then you can spend this saved money on other marketing ideas, or a site redesign (or treat yourself!).

By the way, these are only some of the things you can do to help stop wasting money on PPC and marketing and drive cheaper, better traffic. I am in the process of writing a free e-book all about this, and I will be giving it away on my analytics blog (www.rich-page.com). This should be done within the next few weeks, so keep your eyes peeled!