With the emergence of digital marketing in today’s business, a constant question about what is Search Engine Marketing is revolving around various marketers.
Here I will answer this particular question about what is Search Engine Marketing.
Search Engine Marketing(SEM) is a form of digital marketing by which we promote our website by increasing it’s visibility in search engine result pages(SERPs) primarily through paid advertising.
Basically people do SEM to promote their product and connect it to the right customer.
SEM is one of the best ways to draw in new customers, improve ranking in SERPs, boost search engine presence and optimize other marketing campaigns.
Search Engine Marketing is also alternately referred to as paid search or pay per click(PPC).
Table of Contents
1.Why Search Engine Marketing?
Ranking on Search engines with the help of Search Engine Optimization takes time, that’s why people use Search Engine Marketing to promote their product rapidly.
People use SEM because of following reasons –
- To connect right customers.
- They can reach to their customer rapidly.
- Increase sale through Ads.
- Collect customer data to use in a future campaign.
Search Engines provide tools to create paid Ads, Such as
- Google Ads (by Google)
- Bing Ads (by Bing)
Google Ads – It is an online advertising tool that helps the business to connect to the right customer. Using these tool we can create Ad campaign on Google.
You can create your ads to target audience based on their interest, age group, city and their activity on google.
By doing so you can easily reach to your targeted customers and it will help you to increase your sell.
Many branded companies like Amazon, Flipkart and Facebook use these ads or Search Engine Marketing to advertise their product or to increase their sales.
Types of Ads –
- Display Ads
- Video Ads
- Search Ads
- App Ads
2.Quality Score
When we run Ads on Search Engine Result Page, we have seen that Ads are rank in a different position.
Some Ads are running on the first position or some are on second or third position.
It is called Ad Rank.
So, How these ranks are determined.
The rank of Ads is determined by how much money you are spending on Ads and the Quality Score.
Quality Score is a factor that determines your Ad rank. It is like a parameter used by Google.
Quality Score is determined by
- Expected click-through rate(CTR) – Means how many people are expected to click at your Ad. If 100 people see your Ad and out of the 10 clicks on your Ad then your CTR will be 10.
- Ad relevance – Means your Ad is relevant to your product or not. You are showing Ad of shoes than your site should be related to shoes.
- Landing page experience – When customer land on your website page, the quality of your page determines that customer will purchase your product or not.
How Google determines Ad Rank?
Ad Rank = Quality score * Bid (money you pay for per click)
Let, Your Bid for Ad is $2 and your competitor’s bid is $10 and if your quality score is 8 and competitor quality score is only 1.
Here your score will be 16 and competitor score will be 10.
Then Google will rank your Ad on the top.
Some Terminology
- CPC – Cost Per Click
- CPM – Cost Per Mile
- CTR – Click Through Rate (Clicks ÷ Impression)
- CPL – Cost Per Lead
- CR – Conversion Rate
- ROI – Return On Investment
3. Different Keyword Used in Ads
1. Broad Match Keyword – This types of keyword used by brands when they want to increase their reach among the customers. Broad match keywords target for too many keywords at the same time.
If you are targeting for Office Space and you select a broad match.
Then your Ad will also show if anyone is searching for Office of Ola, Office of Uber or simply office.
These are not relevant to your keyword, but you are using broad match and your targeting is big this Ad will appear on different searches.
In Broad Match many times wrong keywords are also get targeted.
2. Broad Match Modifier – It is a modifier of broad match, As mentioned above.
Many times in broad match keywords target the wrong audience.
So we can use some modified keywords to target the right audience.
3. Phrase Match Keyword – In phrase match keyword we use Quote ( ” ) to define our keyword.
If your keyword is “Buy Jewellery”.
Someone is searching for Buy Jewellery or Buy jewellery for the wedding then your Ad will show.
But when someone searches to buy wedding jewellery your Ad will not show because the word wedding is coming between your keywords.
When the keywords remain in a phrase then only your Ad will show in the search result,
4. Exact Match Keyword – As the name suggest this keyword has sharp targeting and low reach.
When the user search for an exact keyword that you have mentioned in your Ad then only your Ad will show on search engine result page.
4.SEO vs SEM
You can gain traffic or revenue through search engine optimization(SEO) also.
Then, Why to use Search Engine Marketing(SEM)?
- SEO is a process of optimizing your website so that you rank high on search engines in an unpaid section.
Whereas with the help of SEM we can easily rank in the paid section.
- SEO takes too much time to rank high on Google or other search engines. Whereas in SEM you can rank easily.
- With the help of SEO, you can only rank on a keyword that is related to your content. But SEM gives you the advantage to rank on different variety of keywords.
- Conversion of visitors become difficult in SEO, Conversion is easy in the case of SEM.
- Competition in SEO is very high whereas you can reduce your competition in SEM by increasing your Bid value and Quality Score.
If you are thinking about growing your business in a short interval of time then you should use search engine marketing.
5. Key Factors Involved in Search Engine Marketing
There are some factors that can affect your Search Engine Marketing.
By only spending a lot of money in your Ad you can’t increase the traffic of your website or the sales of your business.
Here I will share some tips with you that plays an important role in Search Engine Marketing.
1. Select Right Keywords for Your Ad Campaign
Selection of the right keyword is an important part of Search Engine Marketing.
Your keyword should be relevant to your customer’s interest, What they are searching for, what they need and which product they need the most.
Use some keyword planner tools to identify the highly search keywords for your campaign.
You should constantly interact with your best customer, sales and customer service teams to find out the frequently used phrases.
Use those keywords that have low CPC and focus more on Quality Score.
2. Easy Navigation
Make your site simple and easy to navigate.
Easy navigation keeps visitor to stay on your site for a long time.
They can easily search for all the products available on your website.
When any customer visit your site they search for different types of product, But if they are not able to navigate easily they leave your site immediately.
Due to which they check for another website and the sales on your website decreases.
This creates a bad impression of your website and the bounce rate of your website increases.
3.Well Optimized Content
Content is King.
If you have a good product but the content of your website is not properly optimized then the chances of selling is manual decreases.
Because if customers didn’t like the layout of your website they will probably leave your website and look for another one.
So you should write an SEO Friendly content on your website.
Use Call to Action(CTA) keywords in your title and meta description, Such as
- Buy
- Free
- Discount
Use a title that contains power words so that when any people read the title they eagerly click on the title.
Your Title should be related to your website content.
If your site is about Shoes then use Shoe keyword in your title, not anything else.
It is very important to use relevant keyword phrases in pages title tags, file names, heading tags, and alt tags.
Always use content that is clear and interesting which helps you in engaging your customers properly.
4. Add Quality BackLinks
By adding Quality Links to your website you can increase the authority of your website.
More the quality links more the authority.
Many people focus on the number of links but quality matters more than quantity.
Quality links increase the popularity of your website, More popular websites tend to have more customers.
Try to get links from high authority websites related to your field this increases your page authority.
As the page authority of your website increases the chances of ranking higher on search engines increase.
Many times you have probably seen on search engines that the websites having high DA and PA ranks higher.
5. Measure Success of Ad Campaign
Measure the success of your Ad campaign by checking your position in SERPs.
You can measure the success of Ad campaign by analyzing your CPC, Impression, Bounce Rate and CTR.
Use some strategy to make your Ad campaign more visible to your customers.
Use Google Analytics, this tool provides you with all the information about your Ad campaign.
You can check how many people have clicked on your website URL and amongst them how many people have bought a product from your website.
This will help you analyse your customers and make some changes in your keyword and content according to people demand.
Conclusion
Hope, By reading this article you get an idea about Search Engine Marketing and how it works.
Use Ad campaign carefully by using the right and targeted keywords so that you get more customers.
Don’t forget about the quality of your content using simple and secure navigation so that visitors don’t find any difficulty while searching for anything.
By following the above steps you can easily grow your business with the help of Search Engine Marketing(SEM).
Hey Friend!
I am Ankur Gohite, the founder of Huppdigital. A blog that provides authentic information regarding blogging, SEO, affiliate marketing, and how to make money online.
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