What is SEM? It depends who you ask. Some people view SEM or Search Engine Marketing as paying search engines to show an ad for your business in their search results when a user searches for keywords related to your business. Other people view SEM as an umbrella encompassing both Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay Per Click (PPC). For purposes of this article, we are going to use the view that SEM is paying for advertisements to make your website more visible.
Recently we wrote a blog post on SEO, and while SEO and SEM are similar, they are not the same. They both use search engines to increase your business and can be very effective marketing tools for both consumer and B2B clients, but they have 2 different approaches. SEO is focused on increasing your rank in search engines based on their algorithms, while SEM means paying search engines to show your advertisement to particular users searching terms you have selected.
Here is an example of an advertisement in Google. We typed “Financial Advisor” into Google and you can see the top 4 results are all advertisements, indicated by the small green “Ad” square. It is hard to find a search term that doesn’t have an advertisement!
In order to be successful in today’s internet focused age, you must have a presence in search engines and SEM is a great way to get results. If your client base is mainly in the United States, then the two search engines you need to be focus on are Google and Bing. Within Google, their Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertisements are called AdWords and within Bing, they are called Bing Ads.
Like SEO, you can try to run an SEM Campaign on your own, but it may be a bit daunting. Here are a few critical components to a successful to SEM campaign to help you get started:
Key’s to a successful SEM campaign:
Search Engine Marketing is a path to extensive business growth for the majority of businesses today. Get started on your campaign today or call SocialTrend to discuss our ideas for your successful SEM campaign!