SEM
Considering that more than 90% of internet traffic comes from search engines and 97% of users search the internet before making a purchase of a product or service, it is essential to appear as a result when a user searches for information about your company or product.
How can you optimize your company's presence on search engines? Below, we'll discuss SEM in depth so you can understand its importance and why you need it in your digital strategy.
What is SEM?
SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing . It can be defined as all the tools, techniques and strategies available whose objective is to increase the visibility of web pages through internet search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, Bing, among others.
Generally, search pages on Google and other sites show two types of results:
- Organic results: These appear in the center of the page and are filtered according to the algorithm that indicates which sites best respond to what the user is searching for.
- Paid results or ads: These are usually displayed at the top, and you pay for them based on the number of clicks and traffic they produce.
Definition
So SEM is everything related to marketing through search engines and an advertiser is willing to pay to have more relevance in search results. It is also known as search engine marketing that uses paid techniques (such as advertising with Google Ads or Bing Ads) to better position their ads.
The goal of using SEM is to create sponsored ads based on specific keywords. This way, when a user is searching for something about a product or service, this is the one that is displayed first, and this is done through search engine tools such as Google Ads or Microsoft Advertising or from a third party.
History of SEM
Since 1990 there has been an exponential growth in the number of websites in the same way that technological advances have increased the development of the Internet, from that moment on search engines appeared to help users find the information they were looking for among the infinite options on the Internet.
Quickly, these search engines developed a business scheme to finance themselves by offering these services, such as pay-per-click programs from Open Text in 1996 or Goto.com in 1998. Or like Google, which began to make profits from its advertising services in 2000.
Danny Sullivan, a computer scientist, entrepreneurial journalist , and founder of Search Engine Watch, is the first to use the term Search Engine Marketing to refer to activities related to SEO, sponsored ads in search engines, and the creation of marketing strategies for companies, organizations, and individuals.
In 2010, Yahoo! and Microsoft joined forces to take on Google, and to this day, search engines remain a business opportunity not only for advertisers, but also for specialists who advise companies on the use of these advertising tools.
Who can use it?
Any company, organization or individual willing to make this investment can use SEM.
However, we recommend seeking advice, since SEM is not just about paying and getting results. If there is no good marketing strategy, SEM could be counterproductive. Visit our blog to learn about other marketing techniques and tools that will help you grow your business.
SEM today
According to statistics from 2020-2021, the use of search engines has increased over the years and is key in decision-making by potential customers. 97% of new customers search the Internet for information about a product before purchasing it and on average 3 to 4 searches are carried out per day.
Google has helped at least 1.3 million businesses, organizations and individuals and has benefited from this because 35 percent of all products searched for on the Internet are done through Google, which is why in 2018, 85% of its profits came from its marketing services.
Advantages and disadvantages of SEM
Like all tools, there are important advantages and disadvantages to SEM that you should take into account when using it to obtain better results, these are some of the most important:
Advantages
- Comprehensive monitoring and measurable results.
You can see the performance of your campaign at any given time and adjust it if necessary. Thanks to the same search engine tools as Google Ads and Analytics, you can see the results of a campaign in real time.
- Increase traffic.
Significantly increase the number of visits to a page through relevant and eye-catching ads, either by appearing in the first places or by attracting the attention of the target audience.
- Allows for greater segmentation.
With SEM it is possible to better segment ads, we can target them according to keywords or to an increasingly specific audience taking into account factors such as location, behavior or language.
Once the user enters your website, you can remarket to impact them again with an ad.
- Greater reach.
SEM investment is adaptable and therefore within the reach of large or small companies. All can bid on equal terms to reach those top positions on the results pages.
- Fast results.
The results are immediate, unlike SEO results, which can be more medium or long term.
- Quick return on investment.
Going back to the statistics, on average any $1 invested in Google Ads has an approximate return on investment of $8.
- Short-term profitability.
With an effective campaign and a quality-rated ad that appears first, it's possible to turn those clicks into sales in a short period of time.
- Control over budget and investment.
Thanks to pay per click (PPC), the cost of your campaign will depend on how successful it is. You pay for each click generated and it is possible to adapt this to a daily maximum to have control over the budget for each campaign.
- Flexibility
It is possible to modify the campaign at any time according to the results obtained.
Disadvantages
- It can be expensive.
Although you can eventually optimize your SEM positioning and reduce costs per click, you will still have to pay as long as you are getting visitors. You pay the platforms (Google, Yahoo!, Bing) and you pay the professionals who know how to carry them out.
- It interrupts the reader, it is disruptive.
It invades the user experience because it doesn't appear organically, it is an advertisement after all. There are users who use ad blockers and there are also others who completely ignore the first results because they know they are ads.
- Results depend on investment.
It is proportional, the more money you invest, the greater the exposure and, in theory, the better the results. Unlike an SEO strategy where with a small investment you can achieve significant returns for a long time.
- You must invest constantly.
Not only for bidding on keywords, but also for investing in tools and professionals who apply them.
- High level of competition.
Search Engine Marketing has become popular and many companies are competing to rank for the same keywords. This competition drives up costs and sometimes it can be difficult to achieve a good ROI (Return of Investment) .
- Limited number of words.
Due to the length of the articles, there is a limited number of words that can be used, so you should be as specific and concise as possible.
Difference between SEM and SEO
Both are positioning strategies and despite being different, both SEO and SEM have the same objective, which is to show you at the top of search results.
SEO is organic positioning. It consists of using organic strategies inside and outside the website, or content marketing itself to increase the number of visits and improve the user experience. On the other hand, SEM is the positioning that is achieved through payment.
It is true that it takes longer to see the results and benefits of SEO, but despite this, SEO has many benefits such as increasing customer credibility, profitability, constant and sustained visibility, being a technique that can be maintained over time. Likewise, SEO has 20% more opportunities for quality traffic than SEM.
Because there are users who initially discard ad groups because they know that they are a type of paid advertising and immediately go to half-page results.
SEM (also known as PPC, Pay Per Click ) has the advantage of providing instant results. Its concrete benefits are fast and tangible results, easy to measure and with a highly precise market targeting while remaining flexible.
There is another difference: with SEO, the user is reading exactly what he is looking for, while in the case of SEM, ads may appear that the user did not explicitly request.
Knowing this, if you have to choose only one of these strategies, choose SEO. This practice not only provides a reliable and efficient strategy that brings traffic, leads and income to the website, but also makes it more profitable than SEM.
Likewise, we recommend that you take advantage of the benefits that both can bring to your business, as together they will allow you to obtain faster results and for longer.
15 SEM Terms You Should Know
Ad rank
It is the combination of the Quality Score and Maximum CPC (cost per click) and determines the position in which the ad will appear on the results page.
Avg. Position
The position in the paid results where the ad appears. The first place is position 1, for example.
CPC ( Cost per click )
It is the amount of money spent for each click received.
Paid advertising campaigns
These are strategies that use various specific ads to achieve a goal.
Click through rate (CTR)
The percentage of clicks you receive compared to the number of times your ad appears.
Conversion
The percentage of time it takes a user to complete the desired action after clicking your ad.
Geo-targeting
Apply specific ads depending on the geographic location of the person performing the search.
Impressions
The number of times a keyword has been searched for and the ad was displayed somewhere on web pages.
Keywords
Words or phrases that cause the search engine to display matching or relevant results.
Pay per click (PPC)
It is the other name for SEM, it is a marketing model where an advertisement is placed and you pay for each click received on it.
Return on investment (ROI)
The profit produced by advertisements in contrast to the money invested.
Search advertising
Synonym of SEM, it is the use of ads in search engine results to advertise a product.
Search engine marketing (SEM)
Using paid advertising to appear in search engine results.
Search engine optimization (SEO)
It is the optimization of a site to appear organically in Google results.
Search engine result pages (SERPs)
The results page displayed by the search engine.
Best practices for your SEM campaigns
It boils down to optimizing paid ads in the best way to focus them on a goal. Simply put, the following aspects cannot be missing for the success of your SEM campaigns.
Good keywords
You should do your research and find the words that best describe your product.
Adequate search volume
Keywords should have an optimal search volume. If no one is searching for them then you won't get any results, but if they are too general then they lose relevance and can be claimed by the competition. Therefore, they should be searched for with a high search volume, but with little competition behind them.
Good bidding for the words
If the bid for a highly sought-after keyword is too low, your competition will outbid that ad and your campaign will be unsuccessful.
The structure of the campaign
In Google Ads, a campaign can be structured from specific to general:
The advertisement, the keywords, the group or topic that contains these words and the campaign.
An example would be: Shoes Campaign > Sports Shoes > Running Shoes, Athletic Shoes, Men's Shoes, etc. > Copy or ad to be displayed.
SEM Tools
We have already discussed the definition, the structure, the terms, now more than ever it is time to talk about the tools that will allow you to carry out your SEM strategy in the best possible way.
Adbeat
It is a tool that allows you to analyze the marketing strategy of a company. With Adbeat you only have to search for the name of the company and it will show you: number of ads viewed, the channels they use, the format of their ads, the media they use and you can look at each of their ads to get ideas.
Google analytics
It is a service that monitors and reports statistics on a website's traffic, such as the time a user spends on the page, pages per session, or the bounce rate.
Google keyword planner
Tool part of the Google Ads platform that allows you to research keywords related to your company to establish campaigns, estimate how much they are searched for, and estimate costs.
Hubspot's ad tracking software
It allows you to create, manage and report on campaigns across different platforms (Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and more) and can analyze audience behavior and determine who interacts with your ads and how.
Optmyzr
It is a software for managing PPC campaigns. You can perform keyword research, automated bidding, set budgets, A/B testing, analysis, cost projections and much more.
Supermetrics
Report information from marketing platforms like Google Ads, Facebook, or other social networks to a platform or database, such as Sheets or Microsoft Excel,
Google traffic estimator
Allows you to monitor keyword traffic before creating a campaign, you can estimate the CPC or estimated traffic.
The focus of a successful campaign must be diversified, SEO and SEM complement each other and together they can achieve many more results for your brand than each strategy would achieve on its own. In our Meaningful blog you can get more information about marketing strategies that will help you take off your business.