Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Search Engine Marketing, or SEM, is a digital marketing strategy used to increase the visibility and traffic of your website and is one of the most effective ways to grow your business and reach more audiences.
Like search engine optimization (SEO) brings more traffic to your website, search engine marketing (SEM) is another way to get more traffic.
What you learn here about Search Engine Marketing (SEM):
- What is Search Engine Marketing (SEM)?
- What is the difference between SEM and SEO (SEM vs. SEO)?
- Why is Search Engine Marketing Important?
- How does Search Engine Marketing SEM) work?
- Why is the keyword search important for SEM?
- What are search engine marketing concepts?
- What Are Search Engine Marketing Tools?
- What is A/B testing on SEM?
1. What is Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
As I explained, Search Engine Marketing, or SEM, is one of the most effective ways to grow your business to reach a new audience. Investing in Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is a great strategy to raise your brand awareness and increase sales.
Search Engine Marketing is a digital marketing strategy that helps you to get on the top of the first search engine result pages. So basically, SEM uses Paid Advertising to get you on top of search engine result pages or (SERPs).
When a user uses a search engine and types a keyword t, SEM shows your business (based on their needs) to appear as a result of that search engine. SEM uses Pay-Per-Click (PPC) to help your business grow faster.
2. What is the difference between SEM and SEO?
The difference between Search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) is that SEO focuses on getting traffic and reaching more audiences from organic search. But, Search engine marketing (SEM) focuses on getting traffic from paid search or paid per click (PPC).
Google search results are divided into two main categories:
- One is the paid search result, which you should see at the top of the search result
- Two is the organic search result, which shows up after the paid result, and because they didn’t pay, they show up after the paid result.
Here is an example of SEO vs. SEM: I searched on google about the best running shoes for men. Please check the result.
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| SEO Vs. SEM |
As you see in the search result of what I did search for, the 3 top results show up by ad (advertise), which means they came up from SEM strategy results, and the rest of them are organic search results or (SEO), which mean they did good enough on SEO, so they don’t need to pay to be on the first page.
3. Why is Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Important?
SEO & SEM are essential for marketing; one way or another, they bring traffic to your website differently, so you need both to grow. Search engine opination (SEO) is a powerful way to drive long-term traffic, while search engine marketing (SEM) is a highly effective way to drive conversions & traffic, but for the short-term.
The number of online consumers searching & shopping increases every year, and search engine marketing has become a crucial online marketing strategy for increasing a company’s sales, reach, and growth.
In search engine marketing, advertisers only pay for impressions that result in visitors, making it an efficient way for a company to invest more money in marketing strategy.
Using search engine marketing (SEM) gives you some benefits, and here are some examples of what you get from search engine marketing:
– Highly qualified traffic to your page:
Guiding the right users by using keywords on your landing pages is one of the bases of any digital marketing strategy. Search engine marketing effectively brings the right user by filtering based on the world they seek. This is your insurance that the traffic you make by search engine marketing is not wasting time and money.
– Generate conversions:
You can measure conversions and ensure that your ads are effective.
– Better Brand Awareness:
SEM can boost your brand awareness by up to 80%. When people seek something and see the result in ads, sometimes they don’t click on it, but they can recognize the product, brand, and even your website URL.
– Immediate result:
SEO brings organic search results, but organic search result often takes months, but paid ads appear on top and bring results immediately. So, search engine marketing helps you to reach your target audience instantly.
These are some of the benefits of search engine marketing (SEO), it depends on what you need, and you will see the result based on your need. Now it’s time to learn how SEM works.
4. How does Search Engine Marketing SEM) work?
Search engines use complicated algorithms to ensure the most relevant results are returned for each search people do in the search engine. These are based on your location, gender, and other available information.
SEM or pay-per-click ads, which you can launch through Google Ads. There are so many other platforms to use PPC ads on other sites, but Google ads are the most essential because 80% of users use the google search engine, so we focus on google here.
What Is Google Ad?
I am sure you have seen it before. When you search for a keyword on google, you see ads on top of page results.
For example, I am going to search design websites on the internet, and on the first page, the first result I see is this.
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| How Does the SEM Work? |
The website design google result was Canva; you can see the (Ad) means to advertise, which came from the SEM strategy. What was the strategy behind it? It was the keyword I used and typed for website design, and Canva was my first result.
Google Ads is a tool that allows advertisers to make, measure, and edit ads. With google ads, you can reach out to target customers with text, images, and videos.
Text Ads:
The Text ads appear in google search results.
Google text ads use the keyword to target advertisements that appear alongside search results. When a user searches for a product or service on the google search bar, your ad can appear if a user searches for words or sentences that match your keywords and relevance.
Image Ads:
The Image ads are clickable images, or banners, that appear on the website and are partnered with Google. Google Image ads or display ads, google will start to show your ads to millions of web pages in the google display network.
What is the google display network? Well, Google is making partners with some bloggers, websites, news sites, Gmail or YouTube, and to exchange, they let google display ads on their blog and website. The display network reaches more than 90% of internet users worldwide. Google wants to make sure ads are visible to the right.
Video Ads:
Video ads appear on YouTube, and you should know Google owns YouTube.
Video ads are shown to your target audience, and you only pay if your audience views your ads. The good part is that you don’t pay anything if your audience skips the ads.
What is Google looking for in an ad?
All ad campaigns compete for a specific target group; competitors might target the same users. Google chooses which ads to show to the audience through an ad auction.
Based on Google ad guidelines, there are 3 cores google is looking for:
- Bid: The maximum amount you are willing to pay for your ad click.
- Quality score: The relevancy of your ad or how valuable your ads will be for the users.
- Ad extensions: The additional information you provided in your ads like (links, Phone numbers, etc.)
5. Why is the keyword search important for SEM?
Finding the Right Tools:
For advertising, you need to have research tools and keyword tools to help you better advertise, unless you might waste your money.
Keywords are the heart of search engine marketing. If you know which keywords are relevant to your business, you can directly scan through your master list and identify those you target with your paid ads. Enter the relevant keyword to your company or business and scroll through the related keywords. Find the right idea for your PPC ad groups.
Example: Let’s say you sell shoes for men and want to run an ad for your business. First, you need to do a keyword search on what the most relevant keyword to your business is. List all of the keywords you find on a sheet, and organize them. Let’s say in your keyword research, you found three different queries you want to focus on:
- The best sports shoes in Seattle
- What sports shoes does Cristian Ronaldo wear
- Where to buy sports shoes in Seattle
Now let’s say you are a customer searching for shoes on google. If you type in the first two phrases on google, you are looking for information and not buying it. Just so you know – only the last one is relevant to what you need, so you will need to add the last one to your list.
I hope it was helpful. Let’s go ahead and move on to the next steps.
6. What are search engine marketing concepts?
There are so many concepts for search engine marketing, but here we are going to focus most comments on images:
- Keywords.
- Campaign.
- Landing page.
- Impressions.
- Ads Text.
- Ad Group.
- CPC.
- Click.
- CTR.
Keywords: There are the terms that users enter into search engines to see the search result. They do not have to be individual words. It is common to use groups of words or phrases, such as ” Buy Lenovo Laptop” or ” What are the best social media tools.”
Campaign: Campaign in google ads is one of the vital things you should do, and you should learn campaign check under which different ad groups with similar goals are organized. For example: If you sell shoes online, one campaign could include an ad group featuring sports shoes for men, another could have sports shoes for women, and the third could focus on something else.
Landing Page: This is the web page you want your audience to visit. To achieve good results with search engine marketing, this page must be optimized to get conversions, and users can take action. The keywords and ads on the landing page or (call to action page) should all be aligned to give a good user experience to your target audience.
Impressions: This refers to the number of times an ad was shown.
Ad Text: Text ads usually include a title, a visible URL, and a description. This is the standard type of text ad shown on search engines.
Ad Group: On google, with an ad group, you can check which keywords are the most effective in your ads.
CPC: It means Average Cost per Click.
Clicks: Click is the number of times an ad has been clicked.
CTR: It is the percentage of clicks on total impressions.
7. What Are Search Engine Marketing Tools?
By a simple search, you can see a lot of SEM tools on the internet, but in my article, I want to share the best and most handy SEM tools.
Best SEM Tools:
- HubSpot’s
- Google Trends
- Google Ads Keyword Planner
- Word Tracker
1. HubSpot’s Ad tracking.
Before I start with HubSpot, I want to tell you if you have a small or big business, this is the company you should work with. You don’t waste your money here; they even help you grow and get traffic to your website. I highly recommend HubSpot.
The HubSpot ads tool helps you go beyond traffic and click metrics to analyze how ads influence contacts where they are in the buyer’s journey. This will help you understand which ads actually work, justify SEM as a channel, and integrate your advertising with the rest of your marketing efforts.
You can target the most valuable audiences for your business. Create deeply segmented audiences and personalized ads through features like ad conversion events, campaign management, and lookalike audiences.
This website tool like an all-in-one tool for Blogging, social media, Landing Pages, Email Marketing, Marketing Automation, Lead Management, Analytics, SEO, Ads, And more.
HubSpot Tool Link.
2. Google Trends.
We know the most popular search engine in the world is Google, so nothing can help us to grow but google itself. Google provides some free tools we can use and learn more about our audiences. Google Trends allows you to track the search volume for particular keywords across a specific region, language, location, time, and more. This can help identify the audience, and which search terms are trending. This is a handy tool for your SEM efforts.
If you have an e-commerce business, the ability to gauge interest in your product or service in a specific geographical area is undoubtedly powerful for your paid efforts to a particular location, saving you money in the extended team.
Google Trends Link.
3. Google Ads Keyword planner.
Google is where you want your ads to appear, and google has free keyword planner tools to research relevant keywords for your business and track how searches for specific keywords change over time. The keyword planner will help you narrow down a list of possible keywords and is a very effective tool for your business.
The keyword planner will give you suggested bid estimates for each keyword to determine which keywords work with your advertising budget. The best part, once you have found your keywords and are ready to launch an ad campaign, you can do it all from within the tool.
To get a Google ads keyword planner, you should make a Google ads account, and then you will be able to use it. (don’t worry, you don’t need to pay google ads to use keyword planner)
Here is the Google Ads Keyword Planner Link.
4. Wordtracker.
The keywords are the heart of any Digital marketing. Keywords are a powerful tool in SEO & SEM. Wordtracker is a market research tool. Take competitor’s keywords, in-depth SEM and SEO insights, Google data, and propriety search technology. And make everything easy to start searching around the internet.
Wordtracker makes it with a simple click from the top keyword tool, you will be able to discover precisely what keywords your competitors are using. Wordtracker also offers a competitive analysis to help you find keywords other companies use, which opens up more opportunities to get ranked.
I recommend that you get the advantage of keyword search and are price friendly.
8. What Is A/B testing on SEM?
A/B testing is a search engine marketing (SEM) industry term referring to the formal process of running two variants against one another to measure performance and select which one has a better result. A/B testing means Alpha and Beta, Alpha being the better performer over the Beta variant or version of the test.
A/B testing, also known as split testing, works by splitting pages with similar intent into control and variant groups, such as category pages on an e-commerce site or vendor pages on a marketplace site.
A/B testing can be valuable because different audiences behave, well, differently. Sometimes something might work for one company, but it doesn’t mean the same plan works for another.
How does A/B testing work?
To run an A/B test or split test. You need to create two different versions of one piece of content with a change to a single variable. Then, you’ll show these two versions to two similarly sized audiences and analyze which one performed better over a specific period.
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