Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is defined as the most effective way of internet marketing that enhances the visibility of your web page than other competitors on the search engine result pages (SERPs).
Marketing is itself a broad field. Competition has set such a standard with respect to this dynamic environment that it becomes challenging for the businesses to fight with their competitors. Today, search engine marketing or SEM is one of the vast topics for competitive marketing strategy. In this incredibly competitive marketplace, search engine marketing or SEM is termed as the most fruitful way to strengthen your business. The present article of TheSEOpedia showcases the fundamentals of SEM or search engine marketing as well as some strategies and benefits of search engine marketing.
Introduction to Search Engine Marketing
Search Engine Marketing is a most popular digital marketing technique used in SERPs or search engine results pages to increase the visibility of a web site. Advertisers enter keywords through Bing and Google while searching for a particular services or products. Alternately, search engine marketing is often referred to as PPC (pay per click) or paid search. SEM integrates with SEO or search engine optimization that rewrites or modifies site architecture or content in order to enhance PPC or pay per click when achieve a higher ranking in search engine results pages.
The biggest strength of search engine marketing is that it provides a chance for marketers to place their advertisements in front of potential consumers who are keen to buy and ready to purchase at the same moment. Other advertising channels are not capable to do that which automatically turns search engine marketing into successful and incredibly powerful medium to boost your business.
Importance of Search Engine Marketing
We are already aware that online advertising enables you to serve promotional content to the intended audience and SEO helps us to enhance our website in order to grab an opportunity of ranking higher in search results. SEM, on the other side, incorporates both the advantages by optimizing your content for higher ranking and represents the same to the consumers when they click on your advertisement.
Articulating the significance of search engine marketing, we will be concentrating on the reasons for online marketing which have become more important.
- Conversion-Focused: Objectives of the marketing campaign that a marketer may seek to achieve such as newsletter signups, new subscribers or even contest registrations are the different forms of conversations.
SEM is termed as the major conversion tool for every type of marketing campaigns. The reason behind the same is that generally paid ads are connected to conversation-focused sales or landing pages which drive website traffic through marketing channel. Paid advertisements are linked to landing pages whereas organic results are not. Paid ads concentrate on a precise goal and end of funnel conversions whereas SEO can focus on top of funnel activity and brand awareness (Da Silva, 2018).
- Direct Response Marketing: Direct Response Marketing is generally the conventional sales approach such as mail or advertorial and request the audience to take an initiative. SEM and DRM operate in a similar manner. Therefore, DRM also urges the audience to take any initiative which will have a positive impact on online marketing.
Each consumer uses search engine while searching for information related to any product or service. Therefore, consumers are targeted with the help of search engine marketing whenever they try to search for any product or service (Keptify, 2020). This approach enables the business to target customers on the basis of what they are looking for, which definitely generate brand awareness and increase traffic to their website.
- Flexibility: The major advantage of SEM is that it brings flexibility to the campaign more than any other platform. Ads can be personalized by region, category and audience. In order to create the seamless marketing cross-publisher campaign, search engine on which advertisements are shown can be optimized in several ways.
For companies and their consumers, there is no one-size-fits-all solution for marketing. Search engine marketing offers flexibility with prodigious campaign targeting choices and subsequent success (Da Silva, 2018).
- Online Visibility: In today’s trend, marketing has pushed most of the businesses to go online and create their own website to make it accessible online. And here the role of search engine marketing comes into action. SEM plays a critical role in enabling you to pick the most appropriate and appealing keywords suitable for your web page, as well as support you to enhance the traffic (Keptify, 2020).
You can also gain profit from your attractive website by locating the advertisements on your website that are applicable to your keyword content in the search engine.
How SEO is different from SEM?
SEM and SEO are two sides of the same coin, but they relate to different marketing aspects and comprised of different actions. The two words are often used together to refer to a similar set of actions that can be confusing for the people who are not familiar with this environment.
SEM versus SEO: The key difference between SEO and SEM is that search engine optimization is a search engine marketing component while SEM is determined as the components of paid search like SMM (social media marketing) and PPC (Rende, 2020).
It is important to understand the difference between these two terms before using them interchangeably. SEO and SEM indeed work hand in hand but actually they are not the same term. SEO and SEM are the key components of your online marketing approach. SEO provides a strong way to guide the traffic at the top of the funnel whereas, SEM is termed as a cost effective way to guide the conversions at the bottom. SEO is elusive in estimating the traffic beforehand. In contrast, the volume of SEM traffic is controllable and depends on the amount a person can bid or pay for the online marketing, and it also takes minimum time as compared to SEO.
