Using SEM methods, we expand the visibility of your website by including more than search engine optimization strategies. We use paid search triggers and PPC (pay per click) listings, advertisements and affiliated activities to enhance your presence on the web. Our experts create SEM tools designed to extract the maximum mileage from online viewership.
With an increasing number of consumers researching and shopping for products online, search engine marketing has become a crucial strategy for increasing a company's reach.In fact, the majority of new visitors to a website find it by performing a query on a search engine.
In search engine marketing, advertisers only pay for impressions that result in visitors, making it an efficient way for a company to spend its marketing dollars. As an added bonus, each visitor incrementally improves the website's rankings in organic search results.
Since consumers enter search queries with the intent of finding information of a commercial nature, they are in an excellent state of mind to receive marketing messages and to be nurtured as prospective customers.
Search engine marketing reaches consumers at exactly the right time: when they are open to new information. Unlike the majority of digital advertising, search engine marketing is non-intrusive and does not interrupt their tasks.
Search engines use complicated algorithms to ensure the most relevant results are returned for each search, including location and other available information. In paid search advertising, sponsored ads appear at the top of and on the side of search engine results pages to gain more visibility and prominence than the organic results.
Let's say that you are a customer looking for a product or service online. You go to a search engine 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 ads appear in prominent locations on the page – along with the other search listings that match your keywords. The paid listings are highly relevant to your specific search, making it likely that you will click on them.
When setting up a campaign within an SEM network, the marketer is prompted to:
There are three main types of search engine marketing (SEM), all aimed at helping you earn greater visibility in search results.
The main differences between the three are:
Google AdWords or Pay-Per-Click is Google's form of online advertising. Advertisers bid on "trigger" words and phrases which prompt their ads to display in sponsored search results. Advertisers pay a fee every time someone clicks on one of their ads.
Google's Quality Score is "Google's rating of the quality and relevance of both your keywords and PPC ads. It is used to determine your cost per click (CPC) and multiplied by your maximum bid to determine your ad rank in the ad auction process."
Local SEO is a type of search engine optimization (SEO) that focuses on getting your business listing to show up in Google map results. There is no charge for clicks.
Your positioning in local search results is largely influenced by:
Organic SEO is a search engine optimization process that results in your website content gaining increased visibility in unpaid, non-local results. There is no charge for clicks through to your site.
Your organic ranking is influenced by over 200 ranking factors, each factor with as many as 50 variations. Factors fall into four main groupings:
Probably the most well-known Integrated Vertical Search is Google's "Universal Search" – although all of the major search engines have now adopted similar search formats. This is the practice of incorporating different types of results in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), such as news releases, images, videos, etc., depending on the query. This was a game changer for SEO when it was first introduced – it became necessary to create and optimize many different types of content because they all show up on SERPs. The term for this comprehensive approach is referred to as Digital Asset Optimization (DAO).
This is both a challenge and a great opportunity. The challenge is because the organic spots aren't what they used to be – there used to be ten organic spots on the first page to compete for – and only five above the fold, (which refers to the vertical limitations of a user's screen and the amount of content one can view without scrolling). Now there might be local search results, news releases, images and video included in the results – many of those above the fold. What's the new number one spot? Is it the first local result, news release, or organic listing?
There's also great opportunity in universal search for those that learn how to play the game. You can own more real estate on the first page of results if you can get your site in the local, news, video and image results as well as the organic results.
If these activities are causing your listings to show up on sites and pages that aren't search engine results - can you really call it search engine marketing? What most of these advertising methods have in common are that they are all 'keyword driven.'
There are also a few more similarities. All of these marketing methods are measurable to an extent never seen in any other media. Every click can be measured – where and when it came – and followed through to the conversion, the sale and the lifetime customer value. This feedback loop creates optimization opportunities that can create huge incremental improvements in your SEM campaigns.
Success through SEM comes from consistently repeating three things: testing, measuring and tweaking. The data gathered from your site will not only measure the click-through, but e-mail capturing, pre- and post-sale customer retention.
SEM is a broad and growing field, and is one of the most targeted methods of getting the right visitors to your site at the peak moment of their interest – when they're searching for a solution to a problem you can solve.
