Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is the act of ramping up a website’s visibility in SE result pages through multiple means. These means include SEO and various forms of paid listings. Let’s take a look at each of these in detail, and see if it’s possible to pinpoint what an SEM campaign’s goals should be.
At first glance, it might seem that boosting organic traffic has no negatives since it is free. But the truth of it is that cutthroat competition for top 10 listings for important keywords has turned this into an expensive activity. In order to do well, big sites need to spend resources on SEO, without which even good content won’t get as much exposure as it deserves.
This poses the question of whether it’s better to push more on SEO, or set it to idle after a big initial push and then focus on paid listings. It’s hardly possible in the limited space here to examine the cost and efforts required for site optimization, link partnerships and other SEO components as opposed to paid listings. But the least that should be done is to achieve the initial goals for SEO and get a healthy flow of organic traffic. With that assumption, let’s move to the listings that need to be paid for.
Paid placement is one of the most popular areas targeted for SEM spends. This involves bidding for a keyword and if the big is successful, the ad gets shown on relevant pages for that keyword. The SE’s charge advertisers for this based on a pay per click system, so the advertiser only pays based on the number of clicks the ad display generates.
Paid inclusions are also usually a part of most new SEM campaigns. This is where a company pays the SE a fee to index the site quickly, without having to wait for it to be incrementally as the incoming links pile up. Fact remains that this doesn’t help boost the rankings in any way. To make it sweeter, some SEs may display the site pages as a sponsored ad for relevant keywords with a ppc charge on it, while others throw in a directory listing.
Other methods include local & mobile search, and contextual ads. With a contextual ad a system, a website’s page content is taken into account before displaying relevant ads. In case of SE’s, this means relevant keywords. Local & mobile are still in a state of flux and the ad models are still being worked out, but it’s safe to say that the customer’s location plays an outsize role here.
Search analytics is another critical component of SEM that spans across all the other parts. Unfortunately, this too is a massive subject that cannot be explained in detail here. Suffice it to say that it involves gathering ad spend statistics and monitoring keywords, with a focus on ad history and search volume trends.
Once a company gets used to it, search engine marketing is surprisingly more mainstream and traditional than most other online channels. With a clear plan, it can be perfected to maximize conversions and revenue. This makes it even more important that SEM not be treated like other online activities. Instead, it has to be considered as a part of the company’s overall marketing strategies and goals have to common to SEM and other traditional channels. This makes the management see the ad spend and ROI, instead of treating it like some tech-geek experiment.
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