Search Engine Marketing is a digital marketing strategy used to increase a website’s visibility on a search engine.
The main objective of SEM is to increase your online presence in a search engine such as Google or Bing through paid campaigns or organic techniques.
There are two ways a website can show up in search engine page results (SERP):
- Organic results: Your website appears on the search engine results on Google, Yahoo, Bing, or any other search engine because people use a keyword phrase to search for a product or service, and the search engine algorithm assesses the relevance, the quality of the website, and the authority and return the page. In other words, people looking for “soccer kids’ shoes” will type this keyword phrase on the search engine, and the search engine will return those relevant pages and show them up on the search engine result page. The position of the results will depend on how many competitors are for this particular or related keyword phrase. Organic results are typically free of charge; you don’t pay to appear on the search engine.
- Paid results: Unlike organic results, you have to pay to appear on the search engine. Usually, you pay per click (CPC) or impression. If you pay per impression, usually you will get charged by Cost Per Mille (CPM) depending on the search engine or the network you are using to advertise your content. Usually, on a search engine, you pay per click, and on display advertising, you usually pay by impressions or CPM. To buy advertising placements in search engines, they offer platforms
Search Engine Marketing covers both types of results. Still, in reality, everybody defines SEM as paid advertising and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) as organic marketing or no paid techniques marketers use to improve rankings on search engines. In this post, we will refer to SEM as paid advertising.
Basic SEM or paid marketing concepts you should know
- Keywords or keyword phrases are the terms people type into a search engine. You can classify it into a short tail and a long tail. Short tail keywords consist basically of one or two keywords meanwhile, a long tail keywords are more than three keywords. Shorter keywords tend to provide more impressions or searches but long conversion rates due to the competition; meanwhile, long tail phrases provide low-volume searches but a high conversion rate.
- Text ad. A text ad is one of the most popular types of search engine ad and usually include a title or headline, a description, and a visible URL or web address. Titles or headlines are usually 30 characters long, and descriptions are 90 characters long. You can add multiple headlines and descriptions to an ad. Also you can add images as well.
- Ad groups. This is the way how Google ads and Bing ads organize the ads. An ad group includes several text ads that feature the same keywords.
- Campaign. All ads groups are organized in campaigns; under campaigns, you set your goals, bidding strategies, budget, target audience, geo-targeting, etc.
- Landing page: This is the web page you will use to send traffic from the paid campaign. This page must be optimized, have a clear call to action (CTA), and offer a Unique Value Proposition (UVP). A landing page if different from your website, is just a promotional page that should include a simple message and a simple action you want the visitors to take when visiting the page. You cannot use distractible elements on the page or links to take away the person from the page. Also, you should build your landing page based on the objectives you want to achieve with your paid campaign.
- Search Network. This is the network where your ads will be displayed. Usually at the top, left, and bottom, but it also can be shown in other placements like Youtube.
- Impressions. The number of times an ad was shown.
- Clicks. The number of times a person clicks on an ad.
- CTR. It is the percentage of clicks by the total of impressions.
- CPC. Cost per Click.
- Quality Score. This is the value Google or Bing assigns to an ad and keywords and influences your CPC. The score is defined by the ad’s relevance, clicks obtained, and the landing page’s relevance. The higher the quality score, the higher position will be displayed and the lower CPC.
Online paid advertising is the fastest way to obtain traffic to your website, reach people interested in your products or services, and ultimately generate leads and conversions. However, paid marketing requires a strategy and a plan and, of course, some knowledge and expertise to put together a campaign and all the technical aspects involved in the process, like a conversion tracking pixel to track your campaign results, create a landing page, do keyword research, etc.
This is not rocket science but something you need to learn if you want it to do it yourself instead of hiring an agency. You can learn more about how to use Google ads here.
