What is Search Engine Marketing (SEM)?
With the digital world becoming more competitive, search engines have become a crucial tool for a wide range of industries, including digital marketing, healthcare, education, and eCommerce. Online users use search engines to locate news, blog posts, and brand offerings and make informed decisions based on the information they find online. They also serve as a powerful marketing tool for industry players to expand their online reach and improve their brand recognition.
People with websites can use search engines to promote their products and services and reach key stakeholders. It is likely that you have learned about search engines in your search engine optimization (SEO) strategies, but you might not be aware of their role in search engine marketing.
What are Search Engines?
A search engine is a software system that conducts systematic online searches and provides the most relevant results based on the users’ queries. Certainly, your mission as a business owner is to ensure search engines can find your website in order for it to rank highly in relevant search engine results pages (SERPs).
There are three main functions of search engines:
Crawl
Web crawlers or search engine spiders help search engines find new and updated content, including web pages, videos, PDF files, and images on the internet. The spiders of search engines fetch a few websites and follow the links on these pages to find new URLs.
Index
Search engines organize and store content according to keywords, data, and recency as well as user engagement in this phase. A massive database called Caffeine indexes the new URLs found by the crawling process so they can be retrieved when their content matches the search query of an online user.
Rank
In order to provide the most useful search results to online users, search engines categorize and rank web pages based on relevance. Ranking high on SERPs increases your search visibility and significance.
Several search engines are available on the market that is set as defaults with website browsers. Among them are Google, Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, DuckDuckGo, Yandex, Swisscows, CC Search, StartPage, and Search Encrypt.
How Does Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Work?
Algorithms are used by search engines to rank SEM ads and evaluate their relevance. In paid search engine marketing, the goal is to create a search engine marketing strategy, bid on high-value keywords, and continuously improve your SEO tactics based on analytics.
Our search engine marketing agency follows a systematic approach to search advertising to stay ahead of your competition:
1. Keyword Research and Analysis
We use advanced keyword research tools, such as Google Search Console, to identify high-performing search terms and eliminate those from your list that are not a good use of your search advertising budget.
2. Ads Creation and Landing Page Development
After identifying your target keywords, our experts create text-based ads that display in search results, linking them to optimized landing pages. Your goal is to capture your target audience’s initial search intent and move them to the bottom of the sales funnel.
3. Account Setup and Tracking
Search engine marketing strategies must be evaluated in this phase in order to calculate the effectiveness of your efforts. Using a lead-tracking report, our SEM experts determine if the search engine is capable of tracking conversions. To ensure your landing pages are properly installed, we double-check the codes.
4. Campaign Launch and Monitoring
Having optimized your paid search marketing campaigns, created well-designed landing pages, and developed a robust search engine marketing strategy, you are almost ready to launch your PPC search engine marketing campaign. You can specify location, language, networks, and devices for your campaign settings with our SEM experts. After the campaign launches, we closely monitor the performance of your ads.
5. Evaluation and Analysis
To measure SEM success, you need to benchmark campaign results against your paid search marketing goals. Our team tracks and evaluates your key performance indicators (KPIs) including click-through rate (CTR), Quality Score, search impression share, and cost per conversion (CPC). We can use the analytics results to optimize your next paid search engine marketing campaign to increase conversions.
Is PPC Search Engine Marketing Essential to Businesses?
A paid search marketing campaign should be part of your digital marketing strategy no matter how big or small your business is. Our experts estimate that a prospect must interact with a brand seven to 13 times before converting. Brand recognition can be increased through Google search advertising.
Search engine marketing makes your business more visible in search engines. Unlike traditional advertising, internet search engine marketing allows your company to reach a highly targeted audience. Here are more benefits of PPC search engine marketing:
Better Brand Recognition
Search engine marketing allows you to pick and bid on the most relevant keywords that are relevant to the search intent of your customers. Additionally, Google SEM allows you to place your brand name in the headline, display URL, description, and extension link of the ad. The use of these tactics increases your chances of appearing in ATF Google search results, raises your brand awareness, and brings visibility to your products and services faster.
Increased Conversion
Google SEM ads provide near-immediate results with a fast return on investment (ROI). You can generate new sales and conversions on the same day by utilizing search engine marketing solutions. To ensure your growth year over year, continuous Google search advertising and campaign revamping are crucial.
Specific Targeting
Every month, Google conducts more than 30 billion searches, and 99.9 percent of them do not apply to your audience targeting approach. SEM PPC offers a variety of targeting options, such as geotargeting, ad scheduling, and device targeting, that will boost your ad performance and ensure your Google SEM campaign shows up in the right places.
Greater Campaign Control
SEM digital marketing allows you to manage your advertising budget, campaign scope, and brand messaging easily. In contrast to SEO, where the search engines decide how organic results are displayed, Google search advertising gives you complete control over your call-to-actions (CTAs), ad schedule, audience targeting, and other aspects of your Google SEM ads.
Measurable Growth
With Internet search engine marketing, you can test the performance of your ads and measure the results for each campaign. If you have access to detailed analytics and campaign data, you can identify which ads generate the highest conversion rate for your company in terms of click-through rates, clicks, impressions, and other metrics.
Improved Organic Traffic
According to research, online experiences begin with a search engine more than 93 percent of the time. By achieving higher search visibility, you can position your brand where the majority of your customers are. You can drive high-quality traffic to your website from search engines by understanding what SEM is and how to leverage it to your advantage.