Digital Marketing
Search Engine Marketing
What is search engine marketing
Search engine marketing is the practice of marketing a business using paid advertisements that appear on search engine results pages (or SERPs). Advertisers bid on keywords that users of services such as Google and Bing might enter when looking for certain products or services, which gives the advertiser the opportunity for their ads to appear alongside results for those search queries.
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 ready 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.
Three Types of Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) This is the method of boosting the rankings of a webpage in the SERPs to gain more visibility, drive traffic, and also helps a website increase its leads and conversions.
- Search Engine Advertising While SEO is the means to organically boost a website ranking on the SERPs, Search Engine Advertising is the method that pays search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing, so that an ad will appear on top of their search results. Search engine ads usually appear on the very top of the SERPs, right above the organic results. These ads are labeled as “Ad” when they show up in the search result list.
- Paid Submission Paid Submission is a method of listing a company’s information (including its website) to paid online directories. These directories have editors who manually review submissions. Once approved these submissions are permanently listed and can help increase a company’s online citation which can affect its visibility in search engines.
Importance of Search Engine Marketing
It is a fact that in today’s world the Internet is the source for everything we need to know, learn, ask, buy or do. Whenever we have a question or looking for something, the first thing we do is to turn to a search engine (in the majority of cases Google) and type in our search query. When we hit SEARCH, we expect to either get a direct answer to our question or a list of resources (and this list includes both ads and websites), that can satisfy our intent.
- Search engines are working hard to improve the quality of their search results by presenting to the searcher those websites (or ads) that will keep their users happy and come back again for more searches.
- To do that they have developed complex algorithms that take a number of variables into account before they decide which websites (or ads) to show in the top positions.
- Search engine marketing is important because it’s the process to follow to optimize your website or ads so that they appear in the top positions.
- Your goal is not just to have a presence in search engines but to show up in one of the top 5 positions for the search terms (keywords), that matter for your business or website.
- Statistics show that the majority of users click on one of the top ads or one of the first five organic results.