Search Engine Marketing - What it really means and what it can do for your Business

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is when a company purchases online adverts to advertise their business. These online adverts are specifically known as Pay-Per-Click adverts which are purchased from Search Engines in order to appear at the top or down of the search result pages.

The three most common types of SEM advertising are Google Ads, Youtube Ads. Most people overlook the validity of using other search engines other than Google. But this is a mistake because although Google has the largest audience, the others like local search engines, Bing and Yahoo can cover certain niche markets or even have a pretty large reach too.

Search Engine Marketing is an integral part of modern marketing because it can help businesses:

1. Grow your traffic with SEM

Growing your traffic with SEM should not be your goal. Your goal is to convert those visitors (traffic) into clients. This is how you will make your campaign sustainable. Your target is to get more back than you invested. So you can finance your marketing and scale your revenue month after month.

The initial cost of SEM can be expensive - this is why you need to make sure that you’re following the whole cycle. You should not be directing traffic to your general website pages but to dedicated landing pages that will help you convert better. You also need to measure your return on investment diligently.

2. Grow your traffic with SEM

Harvesting the traffic you send to your website is very important to your business’ success. All the visitors that did not convert yet can be saved as an audience to retarget. You can use tools like social media cookies in order to retarget the same audience on websites like LinkedIn, Facebook, Youtube, Quora etc. You need to use email harvesting forms and engagement tools like chats and contact buttons to make sure you retain the details of those people who are coming into contact with your website. If you do not retain them in some way, they might never return to your website again. An error we often see is to always target new traffic. But this is the most expensive part, retargeting has a much higher return on investment. At this point, you address people that have already shown interest.

3. Evaluate your leads directly

Search engines have pretty advanced tagging tools that allow businesses to track the ROI (Return on Investment) down to each sale. If you can close the circle and create a system that harvests leads from your site and also follow them through, you will come to a stage where ROI is easy to calculate.

As a business owner, you need to create systems that help you understand how much you’re getting back for each buck you spend online.

Measure the various marketing methods and make sure you track them separately. You want to know how much return each online marketing activity is getting you. On average most people will fare better with organic leads, however, a degree of search engine marketing will help you test the market to better optimise your website for organic traffic.

Once this is in motion.
It becomes much easier to scale.

Want to use SEM as part of your marketing?