What Is Search Engine Marketing?

Wouldn’t you able to ranking on the first page in search engine results yet, even though you have spend lot of money and time to build your brand and its website. Having good technical knowledge and doing  keyword research will help you to climb through the search engine results pages (SERPs). But the problem is search engine optimization (SEO) takes some time. You need to be patient and wait to get ranked. But there is a option also. You can go for a search engine marketing (SEM). It will save your time. Let’s  take a look at what is the search engine marketing and how to get started.

Search Engine Marketing vs SEO 

You might have got a problem, Search engine optimization and search engine marketing are different or are they same? Both SEO and SEM are two different things, but they are closely related. Search engine optimization (SEO) helps to improve your site to get better organic search engine ranking. SEO focus on placing keywords strategically throughout the site, link building, using meta data that’s crawlable by Google and establish your site authority.

In search engine marketing, you pay to show your ads in search engine results pages. They will be shown to the people who actively searching something related to your targeting keywords. If you are willing to pay for your ads, you don’t need to have a high site authority.

Do I Need Both SEM And SEO?

You don’t need to use both SEO and SEM. But if you wanna get more leads and sales, you can use both.
If you are looking for doing SEM, why don’t you try to do SEO as well. It’s free and all you have to do is optimize your site according to the SEO practices. The process will take some time to rank you in search results. But SEO clicks will give you traffic also.

Search engine marketing help to build your brand and client base quickly. It’s really fast than SEO. You will shown to the people who are actively looking for products, services or business like yours.

Search Engine Marketing Platforms

Most search engines like Google have an ad platform for search engine marketing. Google AdWords is the most popular and effective platform among them. You can also use Bing Ads and Yahoo Search Ads.
All SEM platforms use a pay-per-click (PPC) advertising model. But keep in mind that all PPC are not SEM.

You can use Facebook Ads and other social media ad platforms to build up your marketing. It is a example for pay-per-click platform that does not fall under the SEM. Facebook Ads  and Google AdWords are two different types of online advertising. In social media ads, they introduce their products to people who happen to be browsing through their feeds. It doesn’t not focus showing to the people who are searching for similar content like search ads.

Do Keywords Matter for SEM?

Keywords are important in SEM as much as it being important in SEO. In SEM, you need to choose keywords that determine which ads will show up on which searches. You can do a keyword research and find best keywords that suits to you. Then you’ll be able to run a successful search engine marketing campaign and avoid missing your target audience.

Let’s take an example. Imagine you are running a business that helps home repairs after natural disasters like fire and you are going to make an ad. What would be the keywords you are gonna use? You might think using “fire restoration” as your keyword because it is the technically more correct term. Would you able to get lot of traffic and potential customers for that keyword? Not at all. Even though it is technically correct, there is a more chance people use “fire repair” or “repair fire damage to house” for searching. They are the best keywords for your ad.

Which Keywords Should I Choose?

Choosing the keywords can make or break your search engine marketing campaigns. Therefore it’s important to choose the right keywords that have high volume and low competition. Right keywords make your ad will rank well and they will bring your cost-per-click (CPC) down also.

You don’t have to pick keywords blindly or wait results to come. You can get help from keyword research tools and do SEM keyword research. They will show you the search volume and competition level of keywords with detailed information about the average or current estimated CPC for those keywords. If you are running with a small budget, these tools are really helpful.

How Much Should I Bid?

Using effective bidding strategy is important as much as using right keywords to get better rank and produce profitable results. All search engine marketing platforms have bidding system. Then advertisers can place bids on certain keywords and audiences in the bidding system.

If you bid the most, you will get the highest rank. Its enough to pay as much as needed to outbid the next highest bid. Which means if the competitor who has highest bid amount has bids $11.74, then you only have to pay $11.75. Even though you are willing to pay more money, that’s enough to get better rank. Business is kind a balancing game between ranking higher and paying too much for clicks. Therefore bidding highest amount more than need is not practically.

If you can’t afford to outbid other competitors, you don’t have to worry. There is another way to get better position. If you create your ads with a quality content, SEM platforms allows you to get better ranking. For example Google gives your ad a quality score and it effect to calculating ad rank.

There are many factors SEM looking for give you a quality score such as how relevant your ad is to the keywords you’ve selected and how strong your landing page is. Optimizing your quality score helps your campaigns to work well.

SEM is a great investment for your business. It helps you to go directly in front of the users who are actively searching something related to your business, products or services. If you have to pay for every click, this will give you more traffic and more conversions.

Frequently Asked Questions

How does organic traffic work?

Organic traffic is the traffic that comes to your site from a search engine. But you don’t have to pay for it. They will be the result of organic your inbound marketing and SEO efforts. Paid search traffic is the traffic that comes from a paid search campaign. You can launch paid search campaigns on a search engine like Google or Bing.

How do I know if a website has organic traffic?

These are many tools that you can use free to check website traffic for any site. Someone of them are SEMRush, Sitechecker Pro, SERanking, SimilarWeb, WebCEO, SerpStat, UberSuggest.

What kind of marketing is most successful?

Social media marketing is one of the most popular and successful types of marketing strategies. It is effective to build awareness of your brand and increase sales. More than 2.8 billion people use social media platforms which means 37% of the world’s population use social media. If you use social media marketing, it will give you many benefit to your business.

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