SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING (SEM)

What Is Search engine marketing (SEM)?

Search engine marketing (SEM) is a digital marketing strategy used to increase the visibility of a website in search engine results pages (SERPs).

While the assiduity term formerly appertained to both organic hunt conditioning similar as search engine optimization (SEO) and paid, it now refers nearly simply to paid search advertising.
Search engine marketing is also alternatively appertained to as paid search or pay per click (PPC).

Why Is SEM Important?

With an adding number of consumers probing and shopping for products online, search engine marketing has come a pivotal online marketing strategy for adding a company’s reach.

In fact, the maturity of new visitors to a website find it by performing a query on a search engine.
In search engine marketing, advertisers only pay for impressions that result in visitors, making it an effective way for a company to spend its marketing dollars. As an added bonus, each visitors incrementally improves the website’s rankings in organic search results.

Since consumers enter search queries with the intent of chancing information of a marketable nature, they’re in an excellent state of mind to make a purchase, compared to other spots similar as social media where users aren’t explicitly searching for something.
Search marketing rung consumers at exactly the right time when they’re open to new information. Unlike the majority of digital advertising, PPC advertising is non-intrusive and doesn’t interrupt their tasks.

Results are immediate with SEM. It’s arguably the fastest way to drive business to a website.

How SEM Works

Search engines use complicated algorithms to insure the most applicable results are returned for each search, including location and other available information.

In paid search advertising, sponsored advertisements appear at the top of and on the side of search machine results page to gain further visibility and prominence than the organic results.
Let’s say that you’re a client looking for a product or service online. You go to a search engine and type in your search terms ( also known as keywords).

In your search results page, you’ll come across various company advertisements whose keywords match the keywords in your search.
These advertisements appear in prominent locales on the page – along with the other search listings that match your keywords. The paid listings are largely applicable to your specific search, making it likely that you’ll click on them.

Now let’s take a look at how SEM campaigns work from the marketer’s perspective.

SEM networks are tone– serve operations. Once a marketer selects a network, he or she can get a campaign up within a short period of time.

When setting up a campaign within an SEM network, the marketer is prompted to:

Conduct keyword research and select a set of keywords related to their website or product;
Select a geographic location for the ad to be displayed within;
Create a text-based ad to display in the search results;
Bid on a price they are willing to pay for each click on their ad.

Text- only advertisements are easy to produce. Marketers enter a headline, text for the body of the ad, a call-to-action and a URL for the hyperlink.

Search engine marketing is considered by many to be the most efficient way to spend marketing dollars.

Examples Of Search Ad Networks

The two primary search networks that SEM professionals target are Google Ads (formerly Google Adwords) and the Bing Ads.

Google AdWords is actually two networks Google Search Network and Google Display Network. The first network consists simply of hunt– related websites possessed by Google, while the alternate includes parcels similar as YouTube, Blogger and Gmail. The Bing Advertisements allows guests to buy advertisements on both the Yahoo’s network of websites and Bing’s network.

While Google Advertisements is a much larger network (around 2x the size), the pricing is frequently lower on Bing Advertisements. Marketers may be suitable to get a better rank for a competitive keyword expression for lower than they get on Google. And some report that the clickthrough rates are advanced as well.

How to choose a good company?

Since you’re formerly making an investment in search engine marketing to bring traffic to your website, it’s a worthwhile effort to optimize that traffic for conversions and increase the effectiveness of your spending.

A/B testing your landing pages is an easy way to maximize your spend, either by optimizing for average order value or revenue per page.

Optimizing your landing page can increase your Quality Score with search engine marketing networks, thus reducing your average CPC.

Optimizely – and other platforms like it – can help you easily structure and implement your A/B tests, offering real-time results to give you confidence in your business decisions. Optimizely has integrations with popular ad networks such as Google Adwords and Facebook that make setting up ad-related experiments quick and easy.

What Value Does SEM Add to Your Business?

Generates Highly Qualified Traffic

Generating traffic organically can be a veritably long and tedious process where the results are only seen in the long term. Search engine marketing allows you to accelerate this process and get users to your website from the beginning. In addition, you can be assured that these users are interested in what you offer, since they themselves have searched for it.

Generates Visibility

Appearing in the top results of Google and other search engines associates your brand with a specific need even if the user does not click the first time they see it.

Gets the Most Out of Your Budget

One of the great advantages of search engine marketing is that it is a suitable solution for companies of all sizes, since the minimum investment is very affordable. On the other hand, if your brand is growing, you can increase the investment and the complexity of your campaigns to keep your momentum. Also, since you only pay if you get results (in the form of clicks), you can be sure that your budget is used effectively.

Generates Conversions

The ultimate goal of Google Ads and other search engine marketing tools is to improve business results. To do this, you will need to create optimized landing pages that put users on the path to conversion.

Gets Measurable Results

Search engine marketing solutions such as Google Ads provide numerous metrics on campaigns and let you to know what is happening at all times. This way, it is very easy to correct the course if needed and get better results.