Showing your website or online store on Google’s pages, driving more traffic, boosting your conversions, and reaching the right audience for your brand can seem like hard work for some businesses.
With extremely high competition, a crowded market, and endless ads, you might think it is nearly impossible for your brand to have a chance to appear in the first search pages of your potential customers.
Knowing everything about search engine marketing can help you boost your brand positioning, increase your sales and ease your marketing process.
This article will help you out with everything you might need, giving you all the information about what SEM is, how to use it, and what its benefits are.
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SEM is one of the forms of online marketing used to boost the visibility of your website in search engines. Search engine marketing (SEM) is all about paying for ads to get your website to appear from the top links options on the SERP of Google, Bing, and other search engines.
This happens through an auction system where website owners can bid on relevant keywords that their customers use while searching for their products. Search engine marketing (SEM) ads are also known as pay-per-click (PPC) ads. This means that Search engine marketing (SEM) is cost-effective as you don’t have to pay for your ad unless someone presses on it. Search engine marketing (SEM) can appear in formats like: text, visual ads, or video ads.
As we said, SEM is all about paid ads that help your website appear in the SERPs, while SEO is all about optimizing your website in several ways so that it can appear in the SERPs organically.
Both SEM and SEO can help your business bloom and can help you maximize your sales and your website traffic. However, SEM can be a faster way if your business is still new in the market, whilst SEO can be more of a long-term strategy to show results.
Search engine marketing (SEM) works with auction-based advertising letting marketers identify their relevant keywords, and then they can bid for ad space on the SERPs. This means that Google sets a rate for certain ad spaces, and marketers start bidding for that space. Hence, every single time a search takes place in Google, a real-time ad auction happens, and your ad appears according to the auction results.
Those ads are using pay per click (PPC) models. SEM ads are placed on top of SERPs above organic results and have the word “ad” beside them.
One thing you need to keep in mind, the ad space is usually awarded to the website that owns a combination of the highest per-click bid along with the highest “Quality Score”. This means that each ad is checked according to Google or other search engines’ evaluating factors.
Some of which are: estimated click-through rate (CTR), relevance, and ad landing page.
As a marketer, what you need to do is to try to achieve the highest quality score with the lowest cost-per-click. This can happen by choosing the most relevant keywords, attractive ad copy, compelling headline and engaging landing page.
Learn more about how to decrease your Cost Per Click (CPC)
Search engine marketing (SEM) can be one of the greatest tools to help you achieve the results you are looking for. Here are some simple steps that can ease the process for you:
To start right, you need to start with good thorough research and set your short-term and long-term goals. What are the best and most relevant keywords for your business? How much traffic do you need? What is your budget? What are your marketing objectives? Who are your competitors? What are they doing?
After a good keyword research, you will have a good list of keywords. Use low-competition keywords and identify negative keywords. There are multiple free tools to help you with your keyword research. Hence, you need to start optimizing your website with those relevant keywords. Write appealing website content, relevant, attractive ad copy, and compelling headlines with those keywords.
This will help you with your SEO and SEM as well. So, it will be efficient if you do paid ads or not. Optimizing your website is not only about keywords, but also it includes visuals, content organization, registering your site in important directories, and inbound links “the higher the “rank” of these sites’ links, the better it is for your own ranking”.
On a side note, optimizing your social media with the same keywords, visuals, and links can have a great effect on your ranking and can help with your SEM and SEO.
After launching your ad, you can start your A/B testing. To know what works best for your audience, use different ad copy, different landing pages, different strategies, and different visuals so that you can detect the performance of each ad and what can achieve better results next time. Track, measure, and analyze the results of your ads to know what you can enhance and what you can do better next time!
Did you know that Google processes over 5 billion searches per day?
Appearing on top of these searches can help you boost your brand, double your sales and maximize your brand awareness. Aside from all of these benefits, search engine marketing has multiple other benefits. Explore some of them below:
A good SEM strategy will help you with your Quality Score, drive more traffic to your website, and boost your conversion rates.
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