Search engine marketing is better known by the acronym “SEM”. SEM is one of the most effective ways to grow your online business and promote your products. Search engine marketing strategies focus on increasing the visibility of your website in search engines. Simply put, a search engine marketing strategy is anything you do to optimize your website’s search engine ranking and in turn, increase traffic to your website.
Who Can Use Search Engine Marketing?
Anyone with a website can use search engine marketing to generate more traffic and increase brand awareness. No matter what industry, niche, or size of your business is, everyone can and should use search engine marketing to grow online.
Why is SEM important?
With the increasing number of consumers researching and buying products online, search engine marketing has become an important online marketing strategy to increase business reach.
In fact, most new website visitors find it by searching on a search engine.
With search engine marketing, advertisers only pay for impressions that lead to visitors, making it an effective way for businesses to spend their marketing spending. As an added bonus, each visitor gradually increases the website’s ranking in organic search results.
Because consumers enter search queries intending to find information of a commercial nature, they are in a better frame of mind to make a purchase compared to other sites, for instance, social media, where users are not precisely looking for something. Search engine marketing reaches consumers at the right time: when they are open to new information. Unlike most digital ads, PPC ads are unobtrusive and do not interfere with their work. The results are directly in SEM. This is probably the fastest way to drive traffic to a website.
How does SEM Marketing Work?
SEO and SEM should be an important part of your online marketing strategy as the algorithms that drive search engines are becoming more complex every day. This means that a well thought out paid search advertising strategy has become an absolute necessity if you want to ensure high rankings on searches relevant to your business.
Tools such as advertising research can help you monitor your competitors’ copy and landing pages, giving you an idea of how to optimize your campaigns and what you can do to beat your competitors.
In search engine marketing, advertisers pay for impressions that lead to visitors, hence the name pay per click. Search engine marketing aims to reach consumers when they need most of the information they provide, making PPC advertising less intrusive.
Overall, a well-developed SEM strategy can also improve your website’s SEO by attracting quality traffic. This proves to search engines like Google that your site is a reputable source, which in turn can improve rankings.
Search engine marketing strategy is a very broad term that includes a variety of other activities such as:
- Search Engine Optimization
- Search redirect
- Submission of websites to directories
- Manage paid search engine ads
- Find an online marketing strategy
- Social media marketing
The search engine marketing (SME) strategy is a mixture of all these. However, it is often known as pay per click advertising. These ads are more visual and product-based providing consumers with at-a-glance information.
Strategy Tool for Search Engine Marketing
Wondering what tools some of the industry’s leading competitors use? There are four essential tools of a search engine marketing strategy. We will discuss these tools in detail in the following sections:
1. Keyword Research
Keywords are the heart of a search engine marketing strategy.
As part of your keyword management strategy, do thorough research before choosing your keywords.
This research will also help you find negative keywords or search terms that you should ignore in your marketing campaigns.
Some keywords have high commercial intent or are a strong indication that the searcher is deciding to buy something. Examples of such keywords are “buy”, “discount”, “deal”, “coupon”, “free shipping” and many more.
Another important factor is keyword grouping and account structure.
A properly structured account contains five elements in the following order:
- Ad campaign
- Ad group
- Keywords
- Ad text
- Home Page
2. Short URL
URL Shortener is an online application that converts long URLs into shortened forms. URLs should be shortened for the following reasons:
- Some posts have a character limit. For example, Twitter
- Short URLs have aesthetic appeal
- Some URL shortening apps come with a traffic monitor. You can count on the number of clicks the short URL receives over some time.
3. Links
Linking is the most important factor in optimizing your website for search engines. Site saturation and popularity are measured by search engines based on the number of incoming links on the website. Most search engines include link popularity as one of their aspects in their ranking algorithm.
4. Web Analysis
Measurement is always the first step to control and ultimately to improvement. Building a web analytics framework will help you focus on your goals. Web analytics helps you measure everything from simple traffic figures to more detailed data.
5. Importance of good keyword research for paid search
Paid ads can appear at the top of Google’s SERP, above organic results.
A prominent position like that is likely to pay off, but to get the most out of your paid advertising, you need to know your audience and create content that’s relevant to them. SEM cannot work effectively without previous work. The idea behind good search engine marketing is to reach consumers at the right time: when they are ready to buy.
How do you know how to create highly targeted paid ads?
By using SEO tools.
1. Find the right keywords
This is where the intersection of SEM and SEO unfolds: keywords are at the heart of search engine marketing. We cannot stress enough the importance of good keyword research to the success of your paid advertising strategy. If you want a SERP, a good SEM strategy complements an already strong SEO strategy.
Once you know what keywords are right for your business, you can go straight to the master list and identify the lists you want to target with your paid ads.
2. Looking for intentions
Before you can design an ad, you need to spend some time on keywords and understand them thoroughly.
Sometimes users enter search queries with very clear intentions about what they want exactly. Those who need commercial information are much more likely to buy at the end of their search than those who simply “scroll” through the content network.
What makes advertising effective?
In short, what makes an ad effective is its hyper-targeted copy and high return on investment. By better understanding your customer base, you can ensure your ads are shown to them when they enter the buying funnel at the right time. This is made easy with advertising tools that allow you to analyze search queries and search intent.
By presenting your business proposal at the right place and time, an effective advertising campaign is an important part of an overall SEM strategy. But that’s not all; SEM is also a great way to drive traffic to your website and increase brand awareness.
In summary, the steps for building your SEM strategy are:
- Do keyword research
- Choose keywords that are most relevant to your business
- Organize your keywords into short ad groups
- Create ads that appear on the SERPs
- Choose a bidding strategy and pay for every click you get
- keep optimizing and keep checking on your ads and traffic
To ensure your search engine marketing campaign is driving quality traffic to your website, follow the best strategies outlined here and be prepared.
How A/B testing can complement SEM?
Since you’re already investing in search engine marketing to drive traffic to your site, it’s worth optimizing that traffic for conversions and increasing your profits.
A/B testing of your landing page is an easy way to maximize your costs, whether that’s optimizing for average orders or revenue per page.
Optimizing your landing page can increase your Quality Score with search engine marketing networks, thereby lowering your average CPC.
Optimizely – and other similar platforms – can help you easily create and deploy A/B tests by providing real-time results that give you confidence in your business decisions. Optimizely has integrations with popular ad networks such as Google Adwords and Facebook, making setting up ad experiments quick and easy.
Conclusion
Google’s algorithm ranks results based on how useful they are for a particular search query, how friendly the website is, and many other variables. So if you want to maximize your search engine visibility, you need to pay attention to these factors.
Getting customers to your website is half the battle, which is why effective search engine marketing is so important. Without them, you won’t be able to rank highly on the results page and you’ll be missing out on valuable search traffic.
On this page, we talk about what search engine marketing is, what is the best marketing strategy for your business, and some tips to help you make money from search engine marketing.
