Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

Search Engine Marketing or SEM is a digital marketing tactic which focuses on the promotion of your website by increasing its visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs). With many businesses out there all grappling for an equivalent eyeball, search engine marketing is the effective way to promote your products, grow your business, and drive more traffic to your website.

With SEM, we can enhance the visibility of our content in search engine results pages (SERPs) and this can be achieved through paid advertising. The target focus on keywords in order to make sure that when a user searches for those terms, they see an ad from the brand, and as long as the user clicks on ads the brand is charged.

SEM

Google Ads being the most popular paid search platform contribute to major portion followed by Microsoft Advertising, and a significant portion of ads on Yahoo.

Beyond that, there are a number of PPC platforms and advertising options on the major social networks.

Initially, search engine optimization and paid search advertising come under one umbrella – Search engine marketing (SEM).

Over the period of time Search Engine Marketing solely known for paid search.

SEM vs SEO: Similarities

Both SEM and SEO:

1.      Help your brand appear in the search result

2.      Drive more traffic to your website

3.      Require knowing your audience

4.      Use keyword research to uncover popular search term

5.      Target specific keyword

6.      Require testing and continuous optimization

SEM vs SEO: Differences

Sno.

Differences

SEM

SEO

1

Tactics

Use paid tactics to gain visibility in search engine result pages

Use organic tactics to gain visibility in search engine result pages

2

Search Result

Include "Ad" designation and have Ad extensions

Appear as a true and unfiltered result and have featured snippets

3

Cost

Pay each time user clicks

Pay nothing

4

Visibility

Shown to select target audience

Shown to anyone

5

Impact

Immediate

Time taken

6

Testing

Good for testing

Not that effective

7

Click-through rate

Lower

Higher

 

SEM vs SEO: Which is better?

It is easier to decide which one of these works best for your website. Some of the criteria that can help you to decide are as below:

1.      What’s the competition in your industry like?

2.      How well do you know your market?

3.      How long are your customer’s buying cycle?

4.      What’s the average cost-per-click in your industry?

5.      How old is your business?

6.      What’s the current state of your website SEO?

Bottom Line

Being a marketer, I may argue that organic SEO is a best approach, but one can clearly conclude that SEM cannot succeed without the use of organic SEO. Organic SEO takes more time to show results but in the end it will be less costly and you will establish a search credibility that you might not get with SEM.

SEM Keyword targeting

Target keywords in SEM guide search platform when to show your ads and whom to show.  There are different types of keyword targeting strategies:

·        Location targeting sets ads  - These are the ads to show to people who are within a certain ZIP code or geographical area.

·        Ad schedule targeting sets ads- Ads categorize to show at certain times of the day or during specific days of the week.

·        Demographic targeting sets ads – Types of ads to show to people who fit certain demographic criteria based on age, gender and preferences.

·        Device targeting sets ads – Ads to show on specific devices such as mobile phones, desktops, or tablets.

SEM Ad Copy

“SEM ad copy” burlesques organic search results with options for showing additional information. A standard ad usually includes headlines, a description, and a website URL. You can also add:

• Site link extensions

• Callout extensions

• Call extensions

• Message extensions

• Location extensions

• Advertiser ratings

• Price extensions

• Structured snippet extensions

Improve Quality Score

A good-Quality Score helps your SEM ads show more often and go lower in cost so it is important to work on improving the quality score by making sure that your ad and destination URL are aligned to the searcher’s intent by sanitizing target keywords in both ad copy and landing page.