Search engine marketing (SEM) is a powerful digital marketing strategy designed to boost the visibility of a website on search engine results pages (SERPs). While the term historically encompassed both organic search activities like search engine optimization (SEO) and paid advertising, it now primarily refers to paid search advertising. You might also hear SEM called paid search or pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.
Why is SEM a Crucial Marketing Strategy?
In today’s digital landscape, where countless consumers research and purchase products online, SEM has become an essential online marketing tactic for expanding a company’s reach. Most new website visitors discover a site by searching on a search engine.
The beauty of SEM lies in its efficiency. Advertisers only pay for impressions that lead to actual visitors, making it a cost-effective way to allocate marketing budgets. Furthermore, each visitor contributes to improving the website’s organic search rankings.
Consumers searching for information with commercial intent are often primed to make a purchase. This makes SEM an ideal channel for reaching potential customers at the right moment, unlike social media platforms where users may not be actively searching for products or services.
SEM delivers immediate results and is arguably the quickest way to drive targeted traffic to a website.
Understanding How SEM Works
While SEO focuses on content marketing to drive organic traffic, SEM leverages targeted ads to generate paid traffic. Search engines utilize sophisticated algorithms to deliver the most relevant search results, considering factors like location and user information.
In paid search advertising, sponsored ads appear prominently on search engine results pages, both at the top and on the sides, giving them greater visibility than organic results.
Imagine you’re looking for a product online. You enter your search terms (keywords) into a search engine. The results page will display various company ads whose keywords match your search query. These ads, positioned in prominent locations, are highly relevant to your search, increasing the likelihood of a click.
From a marketer’s perspective, SEM networks are self-service platforms. Once a network is chosen, a campaign can be launched quickly. Key steps in setting up an SEM campaign include:
- Conducting keyword research and selecting relevant keywords.
- Defining the geographic location for ad display.
- Crafting compelling text-based ads for search results.
- Evaluating the cost per click (CPC) for targeted keywords.
Text-only ads are simple to create, requiring a headline, ad body text, a call to action, and a URL for the hyperlink.
Many consider SEM the most efficient way to allocate marketing resources.
Popular Search Ad Networks
The two leading search networks for SEM professionals are Google Ads (formerly Google AdWords) and Bing Ads.
Google Ads encompasses two networks: the Google Search Network and the Google Display Network. The former includes search-related websites owned by Google, while the latter includes properties like YouTube, Blogger, and Gmail. Bing Ads allows advertising on both Yahoo’s and Bing’s networks.
While Google Ads is larger, Bing Ads often offers lower pricing. Marketers may find they can achieve a better rank for a competitive keyword at a lower cost on Bing Ads, with some reports indicating higher click-through rates.
7 Steps to a Successful SEM Strategy
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Keyword Research: Use tools like Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, or Ahrefs to find relevant keywords. Focus on high-quality keywords relevant to your target audience. Aim for keywords with a sweet spot of search volume – not too high (costly) and not too low (insufficient interest).
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PPC Campaign Setup: Structure campaigns around central themes tied to specific business outcomes. Divide them into ad groups, then individual ads. Account for multiple products and objectives, as ad targeting is highly granular. Organization is critical for efficiency.
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Create Compelling Ad Copy: Write ad copy that directly addresses potential customers. This involves creating headlines, descriptions, and ad extensions. Start with headlines that resonate with search intent. Highlight unique selling points in your description. Use ad extensions like sitelinks, phone numbers, callouts, and structured snippets to enhance user experience.
Alt text: Example of a Google PPC ad showing headlines, description, and sitelinks.
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Optimize Landing Pages: Ensure landing pages align with the ad copy. This boosts ad rank and quality score, increases website traffic, and improves conversion rates. Simple improvements include clear calls-to-action (CTAs), responsive design, optimized page speed, and quality content.
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Manage Your Bid Strategy: Begin running ads to determine the best bidding strategy. Most platforms allow manual bids or automated bidding. Manual bidding is better for small businesses to gather data. Larger companies may prefer automated bidding, but it is likely to yield clicks at a higher cost. Refine your bid strategy over time to account for devices, locations, time of day, and customer affinity.
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Allocate Budget: Focus your budget on the highest-performing ads and target them to your most relevant segments. For instance, B2B companies often allocate the majority of their budget to desktop ads during working hours.
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Refine and Optimize: Continuously improve ad performance by:
- Improving quality score to lower ad costs.
- Adding extensions like sitelinks, callouts, call extensions, or customized URLs to improve click-through rates (CTR).
- Implementing remarketing to reinforce brand awareness.
A/B Testing: Complementing Your SEM Efforts
Beyond platform-level optimizations, use A/B testing to improve conversion rates and increase the efficiency of your spending. A/B testing landing pages maximizes your spend by optimizing for average order value or revenue per page.
Optimizing your landing page can increase your Quality Score with search engine marketing networks, thus reducing your average CPC.
Tools like Optimizely Web Experimentation facilitate A/B testing with real-time results, supporting confident business decisions. Integrations with popular ad networks like Google Ads and Meta streamline the setup of ad-related experiments.
