What is Search Engine Marketing (SEM)?

What is Search Engine Marketing (SEM)?

You made a swanky website and shared your cards with almost everyone you ever met, but your website is not yet seeing the traffic that it ideally should. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) consists of all the marketing techniques and tools that are implemented to make your website dominate the search engine results page for a particular set of keywords, phrases or questions. Did you know that 93{667cc9bc6ea5284aad36e6860a433819c329043ce54d02905014c7c909ebbd74} of website traffic comes from search engines like Google? That is why SEM is very important to every business that has online presence today.

Let us look at an example here.

You will see that the first few results highlighted at the top of the page are
paid advertisements, whereas the results that do not show the word ‘Ad’ before it are websites that
have worked hard on making themselves search engine friendly so that they rank highest (or
atleast on the 1st page) of relevant searches.

Search Engine Marketing is done in 2 ways

(1) Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
(2) Paid Search Advertisements (PPC)

Let us take a brief look at SEO first. SEO is all the things that are done to make your website search friendly. It could be updating your website content with relevant keywords or changing your website code so that it ranks higher on
popular search engines.

At this stage it is very important to understand how search engines like Google and Yahoo work. When you search for something via their search bar, the engine has a complex mechanism of search crawlers or bots that search the entire virtual library to give you results best suited to your search. However, these bots do not know how to read what is written on decode a graphic design.

They have an entire language of their own, HTML, by which they make sense of and categorise and index data. Through search engine optimisation you tweak your code correctly so that the search crawlers find it easy to index, identify and retrieve data from your website for a relevant enquiry or search online.

Some of the important things that the online crawlers look for are website security (HTTP v/s HTTPS), website responsiveness (mobile and tablet friendly), webpage content (quality as well as quantity), page loading speed, user experience, quality backlinks, optimised images and age of the domain.

SEO is time consuming and you have to try different permutations and combinations to get the correct results. However, it is the most reliable and result oriented digital marketing tactic for any brand. In the long run and with the correct strategy it will prove to be the most profitable online marketing tool.

Let us now briefly understand PPC

PPC means Pay Per Click. Pay per click advertising is a term that consolidates all the paid advertisements that one sees online. What it essentially means is that a company has to pay for the clicks it receives via its online advertisements on various mediums.

PPC has many formats but the one that most people are familiar with are the paid search advertisements. They are the ones that show up on the top of the list of your search results on search engines. Brands as well as customers are very satisfied with search ads primarily because they genuine customers and relevant results respectively.

Other formats of PPC ads include youtube ads, social media campaigns, google local services ads and e-commerce ads.

Having the correct combination of PPC and SEO can result in a killer combination to make your website visible to the numerous potential customers who are looking for a solution like yours online. Organic rankings might take time and effort, but they are well worth the investment you are putting into them. Let us know your questions in the comments section and we will be delighted to chat with you and share some ideas!