Search engine marketing is a digital marketing strategy used to increase the visibility of a website in search engine results pages (SERPs) by taking advantage of advertising that is related to a set of keywords.
SEM may include organic search such as SEO or pay-per-click (PPC) advertising that are paid for on an ad result basis.
PPC ads usually appear above or to the right side of the natural web search listings showing relevant results for the keyword.
Pages with higher relevance rank get more exposure and command higher prices through competition on Adwords.
Why is Search Engine Marketing important?
Seizing the opportunity, businesses that harness search engine marketing and devote a budget to pay-per-click (PPC) can increase their reach beyond those people who remember to include their business name in their browser’s address bar or visit their website on a regular basis.
In fact, many of the people who remember your company name are new visitors – they were directed there by PPC ads, online reviews or organic results highlighting your website.
Since these visitors discover your website through an ad or organic, relevant listing rather than typing in its web address directly, you won’t have to worry about paid marketing dollars being wasted on people who would have come anyway.
With an increasing number of consumers researching products online, online marketing has become not just a trend but a necessity for a company’s survival.
In fact, the majority of new visitors to a website find it by performing a query on a search engine.
Search engine marketing is the whole process by which advertisers are able to reach potential customers in an efficient and cost-effective manner.
It’s an efficient way for companies to allocate their marketing budget and therefore less time/money is spent on generating only impressions as opposed to actual conversions that lead all the way up to sales – making it an effective way of achieving peak ROI (return on investment).
Furthermore, each visitor incrementally improves the website’s rankings overall within organic search results too.
PPC advertising is incredibly beneficial when it comes to reaching consumers.
Because consumers are receptive to new information at the time that this message is delivered, there’s no need for anything but a short and to the point message because PPC ads are non-intrusive compared to other digital advertising strategies like email marketing .
Meanwhile, these ads can result in immediate traffic generation which is much more likely than something as time
consuming and bothersome as SEO .
How does SEM work?
Search engines use complicated algorithms to ensure the most relevant results are returned for each search you make.
In paid search advertising, sponsored ads appear at the top of and on the side of search engine results pages.
Let’s say that you are a customer looking for a product or service online.
You go to a search engine page that shows you advertisements, and type in your search terms (also known as keywords).
In your search results page, you will come across various company ads whose keywords match the keywords in your search.
These favorable ad locations make it much more likely that searchers will click on them. Of course, searching for a specific product or service often brings up sponsored links as well.
In addition to these basic paid listings, there are so many other positives when using SEM.
Marketers can set up online campaigns instantly, though they do need to watch their budgets and adjust bids if necessary.
With self-service campaign tools and transparency on how each campaign is performing, this platform really has everything a marketer could want to optimize their SEO efforts.
When setting up a campaign within an SEM network, the marketer is
- Prompted to choose keywords related to their website or product
- Select a geographic location for the ad it appears in
- Create text-based ads that display in search results where you can set bid prices.
Text-only ads are easy to produce. Marketers enter a headline, text for the body of the ad, a call-to-action and a URL for the hyperlink.
In paid search marketing, marketers pay each time someone clicks on their ad — this model is considered by many to be the most efficient way to spend marketing dollars.
Search ad networks
There are two primary search networks that SEM professionals target:
1) Google Ads (formerly Google Adwords )
2) Bing Ads.
Google AdWords is actually two networks: Google’s Search Network and Google Display Network.
The first network consists exclusively of search-related websites owned by Google, while the latter includes properties such as YouTube, Blogger and Gmail.
Joined by Bing Ads, the Bing network is the second largest online display advertising marketplace after Google
Display Network with about half a billion page views per day worldwide.
While Bing Ads is a larger search network, its pricing is often lower. Marketers can sometimes get a better rank for competitive keyword phrases for less than they are charged on Google Adwords and some report that the click-through rates are higher in Bing as well.
How A/B testing can complement SEM
If you want to run a smart business, then it’s always a great idea to make sure that your investment into marketing is as profitable as possible.
It is worth the effort to spend some time working on the optimization of pages in order to maximize conversions and look for ways in which you can improve your revenues.
A simple way to do this is by performing targeted A/B testing on your landing pages, which will help optimize either revenue per page or increasing average order values.
By using A/B tests you can optimize your landing page to gain a better Quality Score with search engine marketing networks thus reducing your average CPC.
Optimizely – and other platforms like it – help you easily structure and implement A/B tests, offering real-time results that give you confidence in your decisions which is great for when you’re experimenting with new features or functions in your app.
If you’re focused on getting more customers or selling more products from your app dashboard then Optimizely offers an easy way to integrate it with popular ad networks so you can really increase traffic by also choosing trial members of the future.
