Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Dominate the above-the-fold (ATF) content of relevant search results and get found by millions of prospects across the web. Begin your search engine marketing campaign today with help from Karitix Internet Marketing Agency — your trusted search engine marketing company.
What is SEM and Why It’s a Great Investment
In today’s increasingly competitive digital world, search engines have become an indispensable utility across industries and institutions, including digital marketing, healthcare, education and eCommerce. Search engines are customer service tools that allow online users to locate diverse information on the internet, including news, blog posts and brand offerings, and make informed decisions. Additionally, they serve as a powerful marketing platform for industry players to expand their online reach and increase brand awareness.
Anyone with a website can leverage search engines to promote their products and services and connect with key stakeholders. You have most likely learned about search engines in your search engine optimization (SEO) strategies, but you may not be familiar with their role in search engine marketing.
Ready to start your SEM advertising campaign? Our search engine marketing agency explains the significance of search engines in SEM and how your business can use them to speed up your customers’ buying process. Learn more about search engine advertising and improve your marketing effectiveness in no time!
What Are Search Engines?
Search engines are a software system designed to carry out systematic online searches and deliver the best possible results based on the users’ search query. As a business owner, your goal is to ensure search engines can find your website for it to show up and rank high in pertinent search engine results pages (SERPs).
Search engines have three significant functions:
Crawl
Search engines use their own web crawlers or search engine spiders to scour billions of pages on the internet and find new and updated content, such as web pages, videos, PDF files and images. Search engine spiders fetch a few websites and follow the links on these pages to find new URLs.
Index
In this phase, search engines store and organize the content based on the keywords, data, recency and user engagement.The new URLs found in the crawling process are indexed in a massive database called Caffeine to be retrieved when the content on the URL matches an online user’s search query.
Rank
Search engines categorize web pages and rank them based on relevance to provide the most useful search results to online users. The higher your website ranks on SERPs, the greater your search visibility and significance to the query.
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What Is Search Engine Marketing?
Studies show that approximately 81 percent of consumers perform online research and spend an average of 79 days gathering information about a product or service before making a big purchase. This means the majority of online users have high purchasing intent.
Search engine advertising is one of the most cost-efficient ways to connect your brand with high-converting customers and increase your revenue. SEM advertising allows you to take advantage of consumers’ online behavior and position your ads precisely when they are looking for your brand offerings and are ready to purchase.
SEM is a pay-per-click (PPC) advertising strategy used to increase the visibility of your website in SERPs and reach customers at every stage of the buying cycle. Our search engine marketing experts bid on keywords to optimize your ad performance, increase your Quality Score and bring more traffic and conversions to your landing pages. Quality Score is a metric used by search engines to determine your paid search ads’ quality and relevance. The better you are at meeting your prospects’ needs, the less search engines will charge you for every ad click and conversion.
How Does SEM
Work?
Search engines use algorithms to rank SEM ads and determine their search relevance. Paid search engine marketing is all about creating the right search engine marketing strategy, bidding on high-value keywords and continuously improving your search advertising tactics based on analytics results to lower your ad spending and improve profitability.
To outshine your competition, our search engine marketing agency follows a systematic approach to search advertising:
Keyword Research and Analysis
Our SEM company utilizes advanced keyword research tools, such as Google Search Console, to identify high-performing search terms and eliminate negative keywords from your list that are not an effective use of your search advertising budget.
Ads Creation and Landing Page Development
Once we’ve identified your target keywords, our search engine marketing experts craft text-based ads to display in search results and link them to unique, optimized landing pages. The goal is to capture your target audience’s initial search intent and move them to the bottom of your sales funnel.
Account Setup and Tracking
This phase is crucial in understanding the effectiveness of your search engine marketing strategy. Our SEM firm runs a lead-tracking report to see if the search engine in use supports conversion tracking. If it does, we double-check the codes to ensure they are properly installed on your landing pages.
Campaign Launch and Monitoring
Now that you have optimized paid search marketing ads, well-designed landing pages and a robust search engine marketing strategy, you are almost ready to launch your PPC search engine marketing campaign. Our SEM agency manages your campaign settings, such as locations, languages, networks and devices, to determine how your ads will run. Upon the campaign launch, we closely monitor your ad performance.
Evaluation and Analysis
Benchmarking campaign results against your paid search marketing goals is key to measuring your SEM success. We track and evaluate your key performance indicators (KPIs), including click-through rate (CTR), Quality Score, search impression share and cost per conversion. The analytics results allow us to optimize your next paid search engine marketing campaigns for higher conversions.
Now that you know what is search engine marketing and how it works, the next step is determining whether SEM PPC is worth your investment. Let our SEM company walk you through the advantages of capitalizing on search engine marketing early on.
Is PPC Search Engine Marketing
Essential to My Business?
Yes. No matter if you own a local brick-and-mortar store, an eCommerce business or a large enterprise, paid search marketing should be a part of your digital marketing strategy.Search engine marketing experts estimate that it takes seven to 13 interactions with a brand before a prospect converts. Google search advertising is a cost-effective way to increase brand familiarity.
SEM digital marketing makes your business more visible in search engines. And unlike traditional advertising tactics, internet search engine marketing connects your company with an extremely targeted audience segment. Here are more advantages of PPC search engine marketing:
Better Brand Recognition
Internet search engine marketing allows you to choose and bid on the most accurate keywords that match your customers’ search intent. Additionally, Google SEM enables you to place your brand name in the ad’s headline, display URL, description and extension link. These tactics increase your chances of securing the ATF Google search results, boost your brand awareness and bring fast visibility to your products and services.
Increased Conversion
One of the key benefits of Google SEM ads is its ability to provide near-immediate results with a fast return on investment (ROI). With the right search engine marketing solutions, you can generate new sales and conversions on the same day. However, keep in mind that continuous Google search advertising and campaign revamp are essential to ensure your year-over-year growth.
Specific Targeting
Statistics show that more than 30 billion Google searches are conducted every month and 99.9 percent of these global searches do not apply to your audience targeting approach. With SEM PPC, you can leverage various targeting options, such as geo-targeting, ad scheduling and device targeting, to bolster your ad performance and ensure your Google SEM campaign shows up in the right places.
Greater Campaign Control
SEM digital marketing makes it easy to manage your advertising budget, campaign scope and brand messaging. Unlike in SEO, where search engines decide how organic search results are displayed, Google search advertising gives you control over your calls-to-action (CTAs), ad schedule, audience targeting and other aspects of your Google SEM ads.
Measurable Growth
Internet search engine marketing enables you to test your ad performance and measure the results for each campaign. With access to in-depth analytics and campaign data, you can determine which ads generate the highest conversion rate for your company in terms of CTR, clicks, impressions and other metrics.
Improved Organic Traffic
Research shows that more than 93 percent of online experiences begin with a search engine. This means gaining higher search visibility positions your brand where the majority of your customers are. By knowing what is SEM and how you can leverage it to your advantage, you can drive high-quality traffic to your website from search engines.
SEO vs. PPC vs. SEM: What’s the Difference?
SEO, SEM and PPC are three commonly confused acronyms in the digital marketing realm. To help you navigate the online marketing sphere and better understand what is search engine marketing and how it differs from other internet marketing methods, our search engine marketing agency discusses in detail the difference between these terms:
Search engine optimization
Search engine optimization is the practice of improving your website structure and content to appear on the SERPs, attract high-converting traffic and boost your organic search ranking. It involves on-page and off-page optimization.
Pay per click advertising
Pay per click advertising is a paid search model designed to promote brand offerings across multiple online platforms, including search engines, websites and social media channels. In paid search advertising, you pay for each action on your PPC ads.
Search engine marketing
Search engine marketing encompasses both SEO and PPC. However, it is most commonly associated with paid search. In SEM, you pay to position your website at the top of pertinent search results.
DISPLAY ADVERTISING
Display advertising focuses on attracting online users’ attention to convince them to take a specific action, such as signing up for a newsletter or registering for a free software trial. Display ads are made up of texts, images or videos that appear in designated areas of a website or social media platform. The goal of display advertising is to encourage page visitors to click through to a landing page and complete an action.
Display advertising campaigns are charged on a cost per click (CPC) basis. This means you pay for every click on your ads. There are various forms of display ads to choose from, depending on your purpose:
Banner Ads
These are image-based ads that aim to get page visitors from the host website to the advertiser’s website. With this display advertising method, you are charged per impression, click or action. Our display advertising agency combines static and animated media to attract your prospects’ attention and compel them to click through.
Video Ads
YouTube marketing and social media advertising platforms opened a new avenue for marketers to immerse their brands into a user’s browsing experience. Video ads appear before, during or after a video stream. To capture your prospects’ attention out of the gate, our display advertising agency develops engaging video ads with robust CTAs.
Backlink Analysis
Our Backlink Analysis services utilise powerful tools and meticulous analysis to assess the quality and quantity of a website's backlinks, identify opportunities for improvement, and develop effective strategies to enhance domain authority, increase organic rankings, and drive targeted traffic.
Rich Media
One of the key aspects of our display advertising services is driving brand engagement within your specified timeline. Rich media ads allow us to add a twist of creativity to bland ads to generate a higher engagement rate.