Search Engine Marketing
Organic Content Rules in an Uninterrupted Marketing Era However Search Engine Marketing Still Holds an Extreme importance if business are to strive and an extremely competitive cyberspace.
Our SEM experts can help you use paid search as a strategic addition to your content marketing campaign.
What is SEM?
Search Engine Marketing is a form of paid search engine advertising that promotes content at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs). Advertisers pay a fee each time a user clicks on a paid search result. In short, SEM is a type of PayperClick (PPC) or CostperClick (CPC) advertising.
Why SEM?
Digital marketing has moved far away from paid advertising over the last decade, as evidenced by the proliferation of content marketing.
Nevertheless, SEM and other forms of click advertising still have significant strategic value when used carefully as part of a broader marketing strategy. Here are some of the reasons why you should use SEM in your digital marketing efforts:
Higher CTR
Click-through rates (CTRs) for most formats of display ads averaged less than 0.5%. This means that less than 0.5% of users who see your display ads actually click. Compared to the average CTR for paid search campaigns is 2%. Paid SEM services move the business needle many times more than other forms of digital advertising.
Rapid Results Potential
It takes time and effort to reach the first page of search results for Google, Bing, and other search engines through organic content marketing. It often takes up to 100 days.
SEM can help reduce traffic if you want to increase organic content and optimize existing web pages to improve search performance. Search engine marketing is not a substitute for organic strategies. However, helping in the early stages of content marketing activities can be helpful.
Brand Awareness
Free search results in the first half of page 1 show a CTR of 50% or more on a regular basis. This is much better than paid search results.
Still, paid search results are the first entry the user sees when scrolling through page 1 of SERP. According to Google, this presence can help increase brand awareness by up to 80% in some cases.
Links to product pages
Major search engines such as Google and Bing offer PPC shopping ads that appear at the top of SERPs. For B2B and B2C brands that sell products and services directly through the website or other online marketing platforms, paid shopping ads basically provide a shortcut to online point-of-sale.
Local Service Promotions
Over 30% of all searches are intentionally local. For local services such as plumbing, landscaping, and event planning, displaying a list at the top of the results can make a difference whether your business goes to those services or your competitors.
Google offers local service ads that local service companies can use to rank high in search results. Unlike paid search, publishers pay for lead generation rather than clicks. Leads are counted as calls, messages, or bookings made through advertising.
How does SEM work?
SEM Management involves a bidding process in which publishers compete for a list of search queries.
PPC SEM
For Google's search network, ad publishers bid based on the maximum amount they are willing to pay for each click and the quality of their ads. Google uses the following steps to determine which CPC ads to display.
- Multiply your highest bid by your Quality Score. Your Quality Score is based on the page's relevance to the keywords used in your search query, your CTR, your previous ad performance on this page, and your overall page performance.
- The resulting score is the ad rank. Search queries only consider pages that meet the ad rank threshold to be targeted for ads.
- Finally, Google determines the order of ads to serve based on ad rank. The ad with the highest ranking will be ranked first.
Due to the Quality Score, the highest bidder is not always the winner.
Local Service Ads
Service-based companies that subscribe to Local Service Ads pre-set a weekly budget for ads.
Unlike PPC marketing services, publishers pay for each lead that is a phone call or message. The cost per lead depends on the type of work and the local market. There is no bidding process. Instead, Google will automatically determine which ads to show based on the following factors:
- Closeness to the searcher's location.
- Business hours.
- Number of reviews and scores for those reviews.
- Ability to respond to customer inquiries and requests.
- Availability of Business complaints.
