SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING (SEM)

Search engine marketing (SEM) is a digital marketing strategy used to increase the visibility of a website in search engine results pages.Search engine marketing (SEM) is a form of Internet marketing that involves the promotion of websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs) primarily through paid advertising.

SEO (search engine optimization) refers to the practice of refining your website to make it perform better in search engines like Google. SEM (search engine marketing) refers to marketing activities involving search engines, like SEO and pay-per-click (PPC), local listings on search engines, and more.

USE AND IMPORTANCE OF SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING

USE : In search engine marketing, advertisers pay for impressions that result in visitors, hence the name pay-per-click. Search engine marketing aims to reach users when they most need the information you have to offer, which makes PPC advertising ideally less intrusive.Search marketing is the process of gaining traffic and visibility from search engines through both paid and unpaid efforts.

IMPORTANCE : It helps to improve code and schema, eliminates poor-quality links and highlight any other areas of potential improvement which in turn helps to increase the performance, gain more traffic and conversions to the site.

Search Engine Marketing refers to a variety of techniques and strategies a company can use to generate more visitor traffic from search engine results pages (SERPS) to a website. The goal of SEM is to promote a website's visibility using paid search, contextual advertising, and organic search rankings.

How SEM works

Search engines use complicated algorithms to ensure the most relevant results are returned for each search, including location and other available information.

In paid search advertising, sponsored ads appear at the top of and on the side of search engine results pages to gain more visibility and prominence than the organic results.

Let’s say that you are a customer looking for a product or service online. You go to a search engine and type in your search terms (also known as keywords).

In your search results page, you will come across various company ads whose keywords match the keywords in your search.

These ads appear in prominent locations on the page – along with the other search listings that match your keywords. The paid listings are highly relevant to your specific search, making it likely that you will click on them.

Now let’s take a look at how SEM campaigns work from the marketer’s perspective.

SEM networks are self-serve operations. Once a marketer selects a network, they can get a campaign up within a short period of time.

When setting up a campaign within an SEM network, the marketer is prompted to:

• Conduct keyword research and select a set of keywords related to their website or product

• Select a geographic location for the ad to be displayed within

• Create a text-based ad to display in the search results

• Bid on a price they are willing to pay for each click on their ad

Text-only ads are easy to produce. Marketers enter a headline, text for the body of the ad, a call-to-action and a URL for the hyperlink. Search engine marketing is considered by many to be the most efficient way to spend marketing dollars.