What is Search Engine Marketing SEM

Search engine marketing is an effective channel for Internet marketing. It can be used to increase a site’s visibility in search engine results using paid and free methods.

SEM is important because search engine traffic is targeted and therefore more valuable than any other form of traffic that can be obtained through other promotion methods.

What is Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

Search engine marketing (also known as search engine marketing) is the process of getting organic and paid traffic from search engines. It has two main types: SEO (search engine optimization) and PPC (paid search advertising).

What is the main goal of search engine marketing

The overall goal of SEM is to increase visibility in search engines by achieving high positions in the search engine rankings or top positions for ad placements. The higher they are, the more traffic, which brings a number of additional benefits.

The importance of search engine marketing

When we have a question or we are looking for something, the first thing we do is to go to a search engine (in most cases Google) and enter a query. When we click “SEARCH” we expect to either get a direct answer or a list of resources (and it includes both ads and links to sites in organic search results) that may satisfy our intentions.

Search engines work to improve the quality of search results by presenting those sites (or ads) that will respond to user queries. To do this, they have developed sophisticated algorithms that take into account a number of variables to determine which sites (or ads) should be shown in the top positions.

Search engine marketing is important for optimizing websites or ads. It makes them appear in the top search positions.

The goal of SEM is not only to be present in the search engines, but also to be in the top five positions for search queries (keywords) that matter to a business or site.

There are a number of methods you can use to improve your search engine presence and achieve higher positions for your ads. As mentioned above, they are grouped into two main types: SEO and PPC.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the process of optimizing a website to get high positions in search engines for specific keywords.

Why SEO is important

If your goal is to drive traffic to your site without having to pay for advertising, then SEO is the way to go. Websites that appear in the top 3 positions of organic results get over 60% of the traffic – this statistic alone explains the importance of SEO. You can get targeted traffic this way. Open Google and add a query in the search bar – sites in the top positions get thousands of visits every day.

Organic traffic, unlike that coming from Facebook or other social networks, converts better because users have a clear intention: they know exactly what they want even before the query has been entered into the search bar. SEO also offers a number of other benefits. For example, trust and recognition: Users trust search engines because they know they have strict rules about which sites to display in search results, and in turn, they have confidence in the honesty, safety of sites in the top positions.

Not only does trust generate more conversions, but it also increases brand awareness, which makes digital marketing work easier in other channels.

SEO is not only about search engine promotion, but also about improving the quality of a website. Before launching any campaigns, it is necessary to improve the usability, that is, you need to make it so that the user can quickly and without any problems find the information he is interested in, fill out a registration form or order a product in a couple of clicks.

The site should be optimized not only for search engines, but also for users – that’s the whole point of SEO.

Paid search advertising

In addition to getting organic traffic from search engines, you can use another method – paid advertising. If you search for products or services on Google, you may notice that there are paid ads above and below the search results. If you don’t go into too much detail, you can pay for it instead of trying to achieve a high ranking through SEO.

That’s not to say it’s an easy way to gather a target audience, as many niches are highly competitive. Accordingly, you’ll have to fight for advertising space as well. The most commonly used model is Pay Per Click. This means that you only pay when someone clicks on your ad.

How Contextual Advertising Works

This type of advertising itself is pretty simple – it’s not difficult to create a campaign and it’s pretty quick. The only downside is that there are narrow, highly competitive niches, so the pay per click will be quite high.

Briefly about how to set up an advertising campaign:

1. Sign up for Google Ads. It’s free.
2. Create an advertising campaign. There can be several of them. Each has its own groups of ads, keywords, etc.
3. Specify the target audience, i.e. the people who can see your ads. You can narrow your target audience by country, time of day, user location etc.
4. Launch a campaign and pay only when someone clicks on an ad.
5. Track the results of your campaigns and make necessary changes.

How much you will pay for each click on an ad depends on a number of factors. The system will tell you an approximate figure in advance, but the actual amount will be determined when it actually happens.

Google ads are shaped like an auction. This means that the cost per click and the position of the ad will depend on supply and demand. Every time a Google search is done, Google Ads will run an auction on the available ad positions.

Advertisers who are willing to pay more and have higher quality ads that are more likely to satisfy the user’s intent will occupy the top positions.

Here is an example of how this works.

Let’s say there are 20 advertisers who sell engagement rings and want their ads to show up on the first page of Google when users enter the query “buy engagement rings.” Google shows 3-4 ads above the regular search results and 2-3 ads at the bottom. That means there are only 7 ads on the first page. That said, the remaining 13 advertisers who aren’t in the lucky seven want to see their ads, too.

This is where pay-per-click marketing comes into play. Like SEO, Google’s ad system considers a number of factors before deciding where to show each ad. Some of these can be controlled by advertisers, such as the price they are willing to pay per click and the quality of the ad. Others are determined during an auction, and others are known only to Google.

Paid advertising is a great way to promote your site in Google, but you can’t call it easy. In addition, if there were mistakes when setting up contextual ads, such as incorrectly specified region, the use of exclusively high-frequency keywords, poorly spelled out UPT, increasing the risk that the money simply go nowhere. It is best to entrust the creation and management of the campaign to experienced marketers.

When to use PPC ads

If you need fast results, you can run an Ads campaign while working on your search engine promotion. In this way, you will get additional traffic. With good results in SEO, you can increase your market share by placing ads for the same keywords that generate organic traffic for your business.

The difference between SEO and SEM

As explained above, SEO is a major component of SEM (search engine marketing). Many people confuse SEO and SEM. Sometimes, when they refer to SEM, they actually mean contextual, that is, paid advertising and think that SEO is a process that goes beyond search engine marketing.

To summarize, no business or website can survive on the Internet without the use of search engine marketing.