A myriad of digital strategies are always in play to ensure that your website and content can beat the massive outflow coming from every portal on the Internet, and online market experts and content creation specialists will tell you that search engine marketing is among the top alongside SEO and AEO strategies.
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What Is Search Engine Marketing?
One of the best and most reliable options to ensure the success of one’s online presence is to rely on Search engine marketing (SEM). To highlight, SEM is a promising digital marketing strategy used to increase the visibility of a website in the many search engine results pages (SERPs) that prevail across the digital web.
Historically, the industry term once referred to both organic search activities, such as search engine optimization (SEO), and paid search activities as part of the strategy. But now, SEM refers almost exclusively to paid search advertising. Additionally, SEM is also alternately referred to as paid search or pay-per-click (PPC).
With search engines having become the primary sources for consumers to find what they’re looking for, search engine marketing has become the critical, if not most important, online marketing strategy for increasing a company’s reach. The fact that most users find the product or service page they’re looking for with search engines alone further proves the importance of a good SEM strategy.
Despite the arrival of AI entities, an increasing number of consumers continue to research and shop for products online. This has led to no doubt that the majority of new visitors to a website often make their way there by typing out questions on a search engine like Bing, Google, or Yahoo.
What Makes SEM Important?
Presently, in search engine marketing, advertisers only pay for impressions that result in visitors, making it a highly efficient way for a brand or company to spend its periodic marketing budget. As a bonus, each visitor incrementally improves the website’s rankings in organic search results.
Since consumers enter search queries with the intent of finding information of a commercial nature, they are usually in an excellent state of mind to make a purchase, compared to other channels, like social media, where users are not explicitly searching for something and are easily distracted by other engaging content.
In a nutshell, search marketing reaches consumers at exactly the right time: when they are open to new information. Unlike the majority of digital advertising, PPC advertising is non-intrusive and does not interrupt their daily routine or tasks. Thus, SEM promises immediate results, making it, arguably, the fastest way to drive traffic to a website.
How Does SEM Work?
While SEO strategy relies heavily on content marketing to drive organic traffic, SEM strategy relies mostly on targeted ads to drive paid traffic. To elaborate, search engines use complicated algorithms to ensure the most relevant results are returned for each search, including location and other available information.
What’s more, in paid search advertising, sponsored ads appear at the top of and on the side of search engine result pages to gain more visibility and prominence than the organic results. How does that work for a customer looking for a product or service online? Well, it begins with them opening a search engine and typing in their search terms (keywords).
This will lead to the customer coming across various company ads whose keywords match the keywords in your search. More importantly, these ads appear in prominent locations on the page, alongside other search listings that match your keywords. The paid listings are highly relevant to your specific search, making it likely that a consumer will click on them.
SEM Campaigns From Marketer’s Perspective
Search engine marketing is considered by many to be the most efficient way to spend marketing dollars, as SEM networks are self-serve operations, meaning once a marketer selects a network, they can get a campaign up within a short period of time. To set up a campaign within an SEM network, the marketer is prompted to first conduct keyword research and select a set of keywords related to their website or product.
Next, they must select a geographic location for the ad to be displayed within. This is then followed by the need to create a text-based ad to display in the search results. Finally, leading the marketer to evaluate the cost per click (CPC) of given keywords. This makes text-only ads easy to produce, since all that’s needed is a headline, body text, and a call-to-action, often accompanied by a URL for the hyperlink.
Search Ad Networks
The two primary search networks that SEM professionals tend to target are Google Ads (formerly Google Adwords) and Bing Ads. To specify, Google AdWords actually comes with two networks. These include Google Search Network and Google Display Network. The first network consists exclusively of search-related websites owned by Google. Meanwhile, the second includes properties such as YouTube, Blogger, and Gmail.
On the other hand, Bing Ads allows customers to buy ads on both Yahoo’s network of websites and Bing’s network. While Google Ads is a much larger network (around 2x the size), Bing Ads offers much lower pricing options. Marketers could also get a better rank for a competitive keyword phrase for less than they get on Google, with some reporting that clickthrough rates are higher too.
Creating an SEM Strategy
- Keyword Research: Start by conducting basic keyword research to discover relevant keywords using tools like Google’s Keyword Planner, SEMrush, or Ahrefs. Keep the focus on high-quality keywords that are relevant to your target audience. Try to find specific keywords that are within the sweet spot of search volume. Once found, begin setting up your ad campaigns.
- Setting Up PPC Campaigns: PPC campaigns are usually structured around central topics or themes tied to specific business outcomes. These comprise subsets of ad groups, further broken down into individual ads. Don’t forget to keep your campaigns and your ads organized for maximum efficiency.
- Create Ad Copy: Ensure to create an ad copy that speaks directly to potential customers. Most forms of SEM will allow you to create ads with headlines, descriptions, and ad extensions. Always begin with compelling headlines that really speak to the search intent behind the keywords you’re targeting. Also, highlight unique selling points in your description so that searchers can get a sense of what they can expect when they click on your ad.
- Optimize Landing Pages: Ensure your landing pages are relevant to the ad copy that got your users there in the first place. This will boost ad rank and quality score, ultimately increasing website traffic and improving conversion rates. Some simple ways to improve your landing pages would include clear calls-to-action (CTA), optimized design for mobile users, quality content, and improved page speed.
- Manage Your Bid Strategy: Start running ads to gauge which bidding strategy yields the best results for you. Most ad platforms will allow you to either enter manual bids for the keywords you’re targeting or allow them to set the bids for you. Automated bidding can be quite resource-intensive, so it’s better to start with manual bidding to gather data. Over time, after sufficient data, you can then refine your bid strategy to account for different segments such as devices, locations, time of day, and even customer affinity.
- Allocate Budget: Focus your budget on the highest performing ads and target them to your most relevant segments. For example, many B2B companies choose to allocate the majority of their budget to serving ads to desktops during working hours, for a greater chance of conversion.
- Refine and Optimize: There are many ways to improve the overall performance of your ads once you have your campaigns running. These include improving the quality score to lower the total cost of ads showing up, adding extensions like sitelinks to highlight specific web pages, callouts to highlight specific features, call extensions for phone numbers, or even customized URLs to improve click-through rates (CTR), and
Implementing remarketing to reinforce brand awareness and ensure your ads are staying top of mind as they continue browsing other apps or pages.
A/B Testing to Improve SEM
In addition to platform-level improvements one can make directly in the dashboard, it is also a good option to optimize traffic for conversions and increase the efficiency of your spending using a dedicated A/B testing and experimentation tool. In detail, A/B testing your landing pages is an easy way to maximize your spend, either by optimizing for average order value or revenue per page.
Optimizing your landing page can increase your Quality Score with search engine marketing networks, thus reducing your average CPC. Doing so can help you easily structure and implement your A/B tests, offering real-time results to boost confidence in your business decisions.