Search engine marketing is the most effective way to promote products and grow businesses. Search engine marketing defines the practice of online marketing using paid advertisements that appear on the search engine result page(SERPs). Advertisers or marketers bid on keywords that users enter in the search engines when they try to find certain products or services. This gives the opportunity to the advertisers to display their advertisements along with the search results.

SEM focuses on getting your company or the client on the first page. The purpose of this marketing strategy is to drive a higher volume of traffic to the website.

These ads are often known as pay-per-click ads. These ads often come in a variety of formats, like text-based, product listing ads, and display ads. These ads help to convert the traffic into customers.

Search engine marketing includes all the strategies that help optimize the visibility of any website or webpage in search engines.

There are mainly two ways to show the results

Organic results are generally selected by the Search Engine algorithm and displayed in the center of the page. This algorithm checks the relevance (quality content and linking to other quality sites) of the website and displays the results.

Paid results are generally displayed on the top of the page, but sometimes they can appear on the advertisement column on the right-hand side. Advertisers need to pay a certain amount when users click on the advertisement. To buy such advertisement space, it is necessary to use platforms like Google Ads.

Search engine marketing consists of a series of tools and strategies that optimize search engine advertisements. These tools affect advertisements to be in the top positions, or getting lower costs per click and boost the conversion rates from these leads.

Keywords And Other Structures

Keywords: Keywords are the most important factor that affects search engine marketing. These are the terms that users enter during a search on search engines. They do not have to be individual words, they can be a group of words or phrases. Search engine algorithms understand those keywords and show the most relevant results.

Concordance: When advertisers set up a campaign in Google ads, they need to define the degree of correspondence between the selected keywords and the terms that people use when typing a query into a search engine. This is known as ‘concordance’. If the advertiser opts for a broad match, the ad will be displayed when a user will search anything similar to the keyword but if the advertisers opt for an exact match, the ad will be displayed when users enter a specific keyword in the search engine.

Text Ads: This is a very useful ad format that is shown in search engines, like shopping ads. Text ads are short yet informative, contain a visible URL and a meta description.

Ad Group: An ad group in Google ads consists of various advertisements that feature the same keywords. Through this feature, advertisers can see the most effective ads.

Campaign: The campaign organizes the different ads of different groups with similar goals.

Landing Page: This is the webpage that users are redirected to after clicking on the advertisement. To achieve good results and high conversion, web pages should be optimized in a nice way and a CTA button should be there like ‘Connect a call’ or ‘buy now’ etc.

Search Network: Search network is the place where the ads appear. The most common places are the top of the search result page and the right side column but marketers can post on other sites such as youtube.

There are few other factors like impressions(number of times the ad was on the screen), clicks(number of times an ad has been clicked on), CTR(percentage of click on the total impression), CPC(cost per click), etc to that optimize the search engine marketing.

There is another important factor called quality score that Google gives to ads and keywords that influences the cost per click. This score is based on the quality of the content, the relevance of the ad, the number of clicks, and the effectiveness of the landing page.

SEM Ad Auction

There is a misconception that search engine marketing only depends on the budget allocated for ad campaigning. Though a larger budget can be an added advantage while targeting highly competitive keywords, but it is not the key to success. All ads go through a process called ‘ad auction’ before appearing on the search result.

The ad auction process takes place each and every time a person enters a query into search engines like Google. To be entered into the ad auction, advertisers must identify the keywords they want to bid on, and state the budget for that ad(per click) to get the ad displayed along with the search query. If Google can identify the ad’s relevance to that query, the chances are high for that ad to get a good score in the auction and it comes on the SERPs. Google algorithm calculates these metrics during this ad auction and regulates the placement of advertisements. This result is known as rank.

SEM To Enhance Business

Search engine marketing helps to get quality leads and enhance any business from the beginning. In addition, marketers can be assured about the interests of the prospects in the services or offers as they searched for those offerings by themselves.

Accelerates Visibility: Search engine marketing helps the ads to appear on the top of the page or in a good position so that users can easily reach those ads. Through this process, the visibility of the brands gets increased.

Accelerates Conversions: The ultimate goal for any marketing is to generate more leads that will convert into customers. To make this more successful, an optimized landing page is very important, which will boost the conversion rate.

Budget Flexibility: Another advantage of this approach (SEM) is that it is suitable for organizations of every size. The minimum cost is very affordable and companies can increase the budget allocation as per their growth.

Read another blog on Search Engine optimization by Clodvandana.