Search engine marketing (SEM) is one of the most sought-after digital marketing strategies that is today often used by brands and industries across the niche. You can consider SEM as a twin brother of SEO, albeit it has many contrasting features and is nowhere near as identical to SEO. Many marketers use SEO and SEM in tandem in order to dramatically increase the quality traffic on their client’s websites.
In this blog post we’ll walk you through several benefits of Search Engine Marketing, which will give you clarity about exactly what makes it so popular among marketers and brands alike. Readers will also come to know why SEM and SEO are poles apart and yet derives the best results when combined together.
Before going ahead, here is a brief introduction about PRchitects. PRchitects provides 360- degree digital marketing services to top brands and startups with strongholds in viral organic content marketing and Digital PR campaign. For all your digital marketing services, you can always put your faith in us.
On this note, let us finally start with out blog post.
What is Search Engine Marketing
Search engine marketing is a form of digital marketing that includes promoting websites or webpages in search engine result pages (SERPs) through paid advertising. Here we need to give stress to the word ‘paid advertising’ (also know as paid ads), which implies that the brands have to pay certain fees to search engine companies to gain greater visibility on their search results.
These paid ads or paid advertisements mostly appear either on the top or bottom of the search engine’s result page. They are often accompanied by the term ‘sponsored’ that is appears on top of the URL. The webpages or URL links that appear on SERPs without the sponsored tag are actually organic results.
In the below image, you can clearly see that the search term ‘app developer’ has triggered the sponsored ads of app development companies in Google’s search results.
Examples of Search Engine Marketing
One of the best examples of SEM is PPC ads, which stands for Pay-Per-click Advertising where you pay only when your ads are clicked. The two most prominent PPC platforms are Google Ads and Microsoft Ads (formerly known as Bing Ads.)
However, Google ads is by far the most popular PPC platform, holding nearly 90% market share in the online digital marketing.
Benefits of SEM
Let’s finally delve into the advantages of search engine marketing
Instant and increased visibility:
One of the obvious advantages of SEM is that it provides increased and instant visibility to your brand. Let us specifically talk about instant visibility since it is one of the unique USPs of online advertising.
As soon as your ad is sanctioned by a PPC platforms like Google Ads or Bing Ads, your ads will almost immediately start appearing on top of the first page of SERP even for the most highly competitive keywords. Now if you Compare this scenario with SEO then sometimes you have to literally wait for months even to rank for low competitive keywords.
This instant visibility can give your brand decisive edge over your competitors as it brings lots of quality traffic without your zero efforts, leading to possibility of higher ROI and conversion.
Measure and track your performance:
Unlike the traditional media, SEM gives unparallel scope for tracking and measuring your performance. If we were to take the example of PPC again then you can track key metrics like click-through-rates, impressions and number of clicks garnered by your campaign. What’s more great is that you can track these metrics in real time. That’s not all. You can also measure other important metrics that will give you much more clarity about the performance of your campaign. For example, you can measure exactly which keywords are getting maximum clicks, in which geographical locations your ads are performing better and which keywords are consuming your more ad budget.
By measuring all these measurable metrics, you can accurately or approximately measure your return-on-investment (ROI) in real-time. This allows you to take data driven decisions for optimizing your campaign, paving way for greater efficiency of your ad campaign.
Great customizing features:
While measurable metrics and ROI is one of the important benefits of SEM, it also offers you unparallel customization features. Allowing you to customize or make changes to your ad campaign as per your requirements in real time. This luxury is again non-existent in traditional medias like print or TV ads.
Below mentioned points highlights customization features offered by Google or Microsoft ads
- You can target your ads only to specific geographic locations including international markets
- You can change the bidding rates of your keywords anytime
- You can also target your ads based on demography like age groups & hobbies/interests)
- You can deactivate the keywords that are not performing well
- You can change the content of your ads (e.g. headlines & descriptions)
- You can make multiple ads in single campaign
These customization features offer great flexibility for optimization and also greater control over your campaign.
Higher Conversion Rates:
Most SEM platforms heavily rely on cookies for better and accurate ad targeting, resulting in quality lead generation and higher conversion rates. Tracking cookies allow search engine marketing platforms to analyze browsing habits, search history and website interaction of the end users. By collecting these invaluable data, SEM platforms are able to display ads that are more likely to be of the interest of the end browser.
Cost-effective and affordability:
On the cost front too, SEM especially the PPC ads scores brownie points over the traditional media. The PPC ads comparatively incurs less cost than the traditional media ads. However, we would like to add a caveat here. In PPC ads, some keywords belonging to certain niches or industries can command a huge price, for instance $300 or $350 per click. That said, looking at the overall cost, PPC ads are still affordable than the traditional media ads.
Another unique thing about the PPC model is that you pay only when someone clicks on your ads. This means that if no one clicks your ads then you pay nothing. But it is important to remember that PPC platforms like Google ads or Bing ads does not give you the privilege of withdrawing unused funds from your accounts.
Boasts your organic traffic:
If you carry SEM campaign for a sustained period of time then it can give you big boast to your SEO efforts, leading to quantum growth in your organic traffic. After all, a sustained SEM campaign creates a strong brand awareness about your brand, which means more and more people will be searching for your products on Google, writing reviews on review platforms, creating user generated content for your brand, giving citations or calling out your brand on leading social media platforms. All these positive actions have a trickle-down effect on your SEO campaign. This is exactly why many marketers simultaneously run SEM and SEO campaign together.
Difference between SEO and SEM
As mentioned above, SEO and SEM cannot be more different than each other. While SEO is 100% free traffic, SEM is a paid traffic. Listed below are more differentiating factors between these two important pillars of digital marketing.
Important Metrics to Track in SEM
- Impressions
- Clicks
- CTR
- Average position
- Conversion rate
- Quality Score
- Website visits
- Phone calls
- App interactions
Conclusion
There is no denying the fact that paid advertising gives brands an overwhelming advantage in the digital landscape. The ability to quickly reach your target audience at a wider scale and measure your campaign performance with precision are indeed benefits that puts search engine marketing at higher pedestal as compared to other forms of digital marketing. While SEM’s immediate result and impact is certainly undeniable, it is recommended that you must complement SEM with a robust and strong SEO strategy for a sustainable long-term traffic growth.