Search Engine Marketing(SEM) has become one of the most effective ways of digital marketing to grow a business in an increasingly competitive market. With the help of search engine marketing, you can increase the visibility of your website in search engines using either paid or unpaid methods.
Search Engine Marketing can also be defined as the process of getting traffic from search engines either organically or via paid methods. SEM activities also include paid search ads, PPC(pay-per-click), cost per thousand impressions(CPM) and cost per click(CPC).
Before SEM was introduced, only SEO was used for optimizing websites for better visibility and nobody cared about anything else. Back then, people were unaware of the fact that there might be other methods that could help to increase the conversion rate or boost website traffic.
But, with the introduction of SEM, new ways of increasing traffic to the sites were also introduced. With SEM, people can take advantage of paid search advertising(PSA) and pay for their ads to appear on search engine results and increase visibility.
Advantages of SEM
Brand Awareness
As we all know, SEO and basic unpaid social media marketing take time. According to Google, it can even take up to ONE YEAR for a quality site to scale the rankings. It also depends on the strategies applied and what the competition is doing.
On the other hand, SEM positions you on the first page of Google. This can help a significant new business with no current visibility or brand recognition get instant attention. This has a strong effect on your sales if you have the right processes in place to turn this exposure into paying customers.
Mass reach
Nowadays, almost everyone is online and over 90% of online experiences start with a search engine. Search engines drive more traffic to websites than any other source. People always use search engines to find what they’re looking for. And, with SEM, you can be the one to serve them what they’re looking for by targeting the niche market.
Besides, SEM allows you to get focused on your target customers in a way you never could with traditional marketing. Distinguishing the main target market increases your chances of converting clicks to sales more than just a plain ad.
Competitive Advantage
With paid ads, your brand new business can also appear above your competitors on the search results. With a strong SEM strategy, you will always have the advantage over your competition who are only depending on traditional SEO.
Scalability
SEM is scalable; you can start small, test things out and as the revenues go up, increase the number of ads. You can even remove the ads that are not working. This helps you to refine your campaigns as well as increase your daily ad spend.
Conclusion
In today’s world, no business or website can survive online unless it follows solid search engine marketing practices. SEM gives you the right tools and process to help you gain more visibility in search engines either by getting higher positions in organic results or better positions for your ads. Besides paid or organic SEM, one major factor you have to think of when it comes to reaching more customers is to always put the user experience on top of anything else. You should make sure that you have a great website with great content and is easy to use before approaching any means of advertising.
Once you have everything in place, then you can move on to start working on your SEO and gradually work your way to SEM and different measures.
