What is search engine marketing?
Search engine marketing (SEM) is a digital marketing strategy used to increase the visibility of a website in search engine results pages (SERPs). While the industry term once referred to both organic search activities such as search engine optimization(SEO) and paid, it now refers almost exclusively to paid search advertising. Search engine marketing is also alternately referred to as paid search or pay per click (PPC).
Now as we have already seen above, that you need to rank on the top of the search engine to get traction into your business. With SEM you can skip through the organic results and still rank on the top of the SERP but at a small fee which is charged by the search engine. At VirtuThink, we help you maximize your results through these campaigns by efficiently reaching the targeted audience with highest conversion rates.
Why is SEM important?
With an increasing number of consumers researching and shopping for products online, search engine marketing has become a crucial online marketing strategy for increasing a company’s reach. In fact, the majority of new visitors to a website find it by performing a query on a search engine. In search engine marketing, advertisers only pay for impressions that result in visitors, making it an efficient way for a company to spend its marketing dollars. As an added bonus, each visitor incrementally improves the website’s rankings in organic search results. Since consumers enter search queries with the intent of finding information of a commercial nature, they are in an excellent state of mind to make a purchase, compared to other sites such as social media where users are not explicitly searching for something. Search marketing reaches consumers at exactly the right time: when they are open to new information. Unlike the majority of digital advertising, PPC advertising is non-intrusive and does not interrupt their tasks. Results are immediate with SEM. It is arguably the fastest way to drive traffic to a website
Types of SEM Keywords
SEM keywords are the terms and phrases that you target in your search engine marketing campaigns. When users search for those keywords, they see your ads. For example, if your campaign targets the term “virtual assistant,” your ad may show when a user searches for that phrase.
Broad match keywords
Target variations of a term. This includes similar phrases, singular or plural forms, misspellings, stemming's, or synonyms of the target term. For example, when targeting the broad match keyword virtual assistant, a campaign may also target virtual assistants, online assistant, and virtual team.
Exact match keywords
Target words that are very closely related to the target term. This includes misspellings, singular or plural forms, stemmings, abbreviations, reordered words, paraphrases, or closely related words with the same search intent of the exact match term. For example, when targeting the exact match keyword virtual assistant, a campaign may also target virtual assistants, virtual assistance, and virtuals assistant.
Phrase match keywords
Target the exact phrase, plus any phrases that have words that come before or after the target keyword. For example, when targeting the phrase match keyword virtual assistant, a campaign may also target best virtual assistant, find a virtual assistant, and hire a virtual assistant.
Negative keywords
Exclude terms that you don’t want to target. Negative keywords are variations of broad match, phrase match, and exact match keywords that you don’t want to use in your campaign. These terms may be semantically related to your keywords but unrelated to the search intent of the target term, your campaign, or ad copy. Examples of negative keywords for the target term virtual assistant may include virtual assistant salary or virtual assistant training. If the ad were trying to target companies looking to hire a virtual assistant, the intent for those terms wouldn’t be relevant; therefore, they should be excluded from the campaign.
SEM Platforms
An SEM platform is a search engine where a brand can place search ads that are displayed when users perform a search. The most common SEM platforms are Google and Bing.
- Google Ads is the most widely used SEM platform. Billions of Google searches are performed a day, so it can help you get in front of the largest online audience.
- Bing Ads claims to connect with 3 million searchers that Google can’t reach. By serving ads on partner sites such as Yahoo and MSN, Bing Ads help you connect with searchers who aren’t exclusively using Google for search.
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