Search engine marketing (SEM) is one of the most effective ways of advertising your business in the cyber world. The cyber-world is a competitive marketplace, with millions of companies fighting for the same spotlight. Advertising online and SEM is the most effective way to promote your products and grow your business.
In this guide, Bevenny Creations, a web design agency in Liberia, will help give you an overview of search engine marketing basics. They will also help you with a few tips and strategies on how to do search engine marketing right.
What is search engine marketing?
SEM is the process of marketing a business using paid advertisements that appear on search engine results pages (SERPs). Advertisers get to bid on keywords that users of services such as Google or Bing might enter when searching for certain services, products, or even answers to a question. Keywords give the advertiser the opportunity for their ads to appear alongside those search queries.
These ads are often known as pay-per-click (PPC), and they come in a variety of formats. Some are small, text-based ads, whereas others, such as product listing ads (PLAs, also known as Shopping ads) are more visual, product-based advertisements that allow consumers to see important information at-a-glance, such as reviews and price.
Search engine marketing’s greatest strength is that it offers advertisers the opportunity to put their ads in front of motivated customers who are ready to buy at the precise moment they’re prepared to make a purchase. No other advertising medium can do this, which is why search engine marketing is so effective and such an amazingly powerful way to grow your business.
The fight – SEM vs. SEO
SEM vs. SEO: what is the difference? The difference between SEO and SEM is simply that Search Engine Optimization is part of Search engine marketing or Search marketing as it is widely known. Both processes aim to increase visibility in search engines.
SEO is about optimizing your website to get better rankings in the search results while SEM goes beyond SEO. It involves other methods that can get you more search engine visitors like PPC advertising.
Generally, “search engine marketing” refers to paid search marketing, a system where businesses pay search engines to show their ads in the search results.
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is different because businesses don’t pay search engines for traffic and clicks; instead, they earn a free spot in the search results by having the most relevant content for a given keyword search.
What makes SEM and SEO function – Keywords
When you use Google or any other search engine, you type words into the search box to find what you’re looking for. The results that Google returns – whether they’re organic results or paid advertisements – are there because they’re relevant to the words in the search box.
Keywords are the foundation of search engine marketing. As users enter keywords (as part of search queries) into search engines to find what they’re looking for, it should come as little surprise that keywords form the basis of SEM as an advertising strategy.