Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is one of the most cost-efficient ways to reach your target audience and grow your company in a competitive marketplace. With tons of businesses out there all competing for the same goal, it’s never been more critical than now to have a strong online presence that search engines recognize, and, SEM is the best option for you. But how is SEM used in marketing? Let’s find out!
SEM influences the power of search engines like Google in order to reach potential customers at the perfect time and place. If you have heard of pay-per-click advertising, this may sound familiar because PPC is the same as SEM. In fact, it’s also known by many terminologies such as Paid Search Ads and Paid Advertising.
According to Mind Your Own Business (an Australian multinational corporation providing tax, accounting and other services to SMEs), 90% of online searches are conducted by people who are at the end of their buying cycle. This opens up a lot of opportunities for businesses that are utilizing SEM. When done properly, SEM will get your ads in front of your target market with content that is highly important to them, all for free until they click on your ad.
SEM and SEO: Are They the Same?
With Search Engine Marketing, your ad is placed on the sponsored section of a search engine’s result. Essentially, it is ranked based on how much you pay for the keywords you used and a “quality score” of how relevant your ad is in relation to others.
On the other hand, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) helps your website’s ranking to naturally come up higher in organic, non-paid search results.
SEM and SEO will not only increase the visibility of your ads but also boost your website traffic. These essentials enable you to convert prospects into leads, especially when both your paid ads and site come up on top of any search engine results.
Benefits of Search Engine Marketing for your business
To guide you on the importance of Search Engine Marketing, check out the amazing benefits that you can get when utilizing SEM:
→ Reach Your Target Audience Instantly
SEM is used to describe Google paid search ads. This technique is often used as a short-term strategy bringing fast visibility to your products or services. Compared to Search Engine Optimization – SEO, paid search ads provide quick results as they let you reach your target customers instantly.
→ Boost Brand Awareness
Google Search Ads allow advertisers to expose their brand name either in the ad’s headlines, description, display URL, or extension links. This simply tells you that these paid search ads contribute to high brand awareness especially because they are often seen on top of Google search results.
→ Generate Geo-Targeted Search Ads
SEM gives you the ability to target people based on their location. You can establish ads in different languages and select where you want them to appear; you can specify the city, the country, and even a definite region anywhere in the world.
→ Manage Ads Easily
Paid search ads are easily managed. Since Google Ads allows you to set up a schedule for each of your marketing campaigns, you can run and stop your ads at any time you want. It is also easy to set up a budget and identify the performance speed of your marketing campaigns. This can help you augment your ads and bring more traffic to your business easily.
→ Pay Only Per Action
After your paid search ads are generated, they will appear for free and you will only pay when someone takes action – meaning, clicks on your ad. Thus, you can get free exposure and brand awareness on search engines and get charged only when somebody clicks on your ad and visits your landing page.
→ Appear On Competitors’ Related Keywords
As a best practice for SEM, it is a good idea to create search ads that are prompted to appear on your competitors’ related keywords. This will secure your exposure to those keywords and eventually have a chance to convert clients from competitors to your business.
→ Measure Your Performance
Paid search ads give you the opening to test your ads’ performance and measure the results you’ve collected for each marketing campaign. Google Ads provides access to in-depth data on the best performing ads in terms of the following points:
- Impressions
- Clicks
- Click-Through-Rate (CTR)
- Top performing keywords.
Depending on your campaign goals, you can assess your performance and pinpoint what you eventually need to optimize for better performance in the future.
Markable Solutions keeps an eye on ethical SEO techniques to boost your website’s search ranking by doing quality link building, social and content marketing. We can also manage your paid advertising campaigns right from campaign set-up on various paid platforms, keyword research, bidding, A/B ad testing, and reporting. Interested? Contact us today!
