What is Search Engine Marketing
Search engine marketing (SEM) is a digital marketing policy used to increase the visibility of a website in search engine results pages. While the industry term once referred to both organic search activities such as search engine optimization (SEO) and paid, it now refers almost exclusively to paid search advertising. Search engine marketing is also alternare mention to as paid search or pay per click (PPC).
Why SEM is Important
With an increasing number of consumers researching and shopping for products online, search engine marketing has become a crucial strategy for increasing a company’s reach. In reality, the majority of new visitors to a website find it by performing a enquiry on a search engine.
In search engine marketing, advertisers only pay for impressions that result in visitors, making it an efficient way for a company to spend its marketing dollars. As an added tip, each visitor incrementally better the website’s rankings in organic search results.
Since consumers enter search queries with the intent of finding information of a commercial nature, they are in an excellent state of mind to receive marketing messages and to be nurtured as prospective customers. Search engine marketing extends consumers at absolutely the right time: when they are open to new information. Unlike the majority of digital advertising, search engine marketing is non-intrusive and does not interrupt their tasks. Results are immediate with SEM. It is arguably the fastest way to drive traffic to a website.
How SEM Works
Search engines use complicated algorithms to ensure the most relevant results are returned for each search, including location and other available information. In reward search advertising, sponsored ads arrive at the top of and on the side of search engine results pages to gain more visibility and prominence than the organic results.
Let’s say that you are a customer 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 explore results page, you will come covering various company ads whose keywords match the keywords in your search. These ads appear in prominent locations on the page – along with the other search listings that match your keywords. The reward listings are highly relevant to your specific search, making it likely that you will click on them.
How SEM works from the marketer’s perspective
SEM networks are self-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:
- 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 ads 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 AdWords and the Bing Ads.
Google AdWords is actually two networks: Google Search Network and Google Display Network. The first network consists exclusively of search-related websites owned by Google, while the second includes properties such as YouTube, Blogger and Gmail.
The Bing Ads allows customers to buy ads on both the Yahoo’s network of websites and Bing’s network.
While Google AdWords is a much larger network (around 2x the size), the pricing is often lower on Bing Ads. Marketers may be able to get a better rank for a competitive keyword phrase for less than they get on Google. And some report that the click through rates are higher as well.