Search Engine Marketing Strategy

When you need a well-organized strategy to grow your business in a highly competitive marketplace, Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is one of the most effective blueprints you can use. With thousands of businesses competing for the same goal, it is never easy to advertise your products or services online. Today, SEM is among the fastest ways that you can use to grow and promote your business efficiently.

An overview of Search Engine Marketing

Search Engine Marketing is among the best practices in marketing your business with the use of paid advertisements so that you can enhance your business visibility on the search engine result pages. The advertisers mainly look for the keywords that most users can enter on search engines while looking for the products or services. The advertisers can get the effective opportunity to make their ads appear alongside the results for the search queries.

These ads are also known as the pay-per-click ads as they come in various formats – some are small, and those are mainly the text-based ads, whereas others are the product listing ads, that are also known as the shopping ads, and those are visual. These product-based advertisements allow the customers to get more important information at-a-glance, where they can also know about the prices and reviews.
The essential strength of SEM is that it can provide the advertisers with the opportunity to reach motivated customers who are willing to buy at the moment and are ready to make purchases. There is no other advertising medium that can provide the same results as SEM, hence, it is considered as the most effective and powerful way to grow your business.

How Search Engine Marketing differs from Search Engine Optimization?

Considering the growth and development that digital marketing has experienced over the years, various companies have created separate digital marketing departments. This strategy is extremely beneficial to make the website appear in the top results in the search engines, and to achieve this; it is essential to understand how to position your website through SEO and SEM.

The main difference between SEO and SEM is that SEM works to get relevant traffic and visibility from the organic and paid searches whereas SEO focuses on optimizing the website to get the traffic from the organic search results. SEO is the well-known strategy to obtain traffic to your website while putting some effort, while SEM is the strategy to gain traffic through payment positioning, mainly through ads.

When using the SEM, you need to pay Google to show your ad in the search results, SEO on the other hand is different, as you can generate the traffic and click without paying Google. Furthermore, you can gain a free spot in the search results when you prefer to go with SEO by having the most relevant content for the keyword searches.

Keywords - How these are essential for Search Engine Marketing?

Keywords are the foundation of SEM, and when the users enter the keywords they are looking for in the search engines, you will be surprised with the results that keywords can form the search engine marketing basis as an advertising strategy.

SEM Keyword Research Strategy

SEM strategy comes into the play when there is a need to optimize the paid search ads while considering the specific goals. When you need to create a good strategy, you need to understand how paid ads platforms actually work and manage the variables that can affect the performance of the keywords, budget, and copy. Here are some factors that you need to consider in your strategy when you need to earn success in your paid ads –

• Keyword Intent
  Pay-per-click or PPC strategy (It is an SEM practice and aims to achieve a high click-through rate to the site) mainly starts when you need to select the appropriate keywords. It means you need to do the relevant research to determine the keywords queries you want your ads to come up for. You can start by brainstorming brand terms, and these terms mainly describe your products, and even the terms describe your competition.
  The secret is to use keywords that your potential clients are using when they are ready to buy. Example searches like “nike shoes” are used by someone just searching general information, this will cost you a lot to show your ad for this keyword combination and the return on investment will be low. Using keyword combinations like “Nike ZoomX Vaporfly size 43” will be shown to potential clients ready to buy. They did their research and they want to buy it now as they search for a specific size. If you are a local store you will also add your location.
  
  
• Keyword volume and competition
  It makes no sense to show your ads where nobody is looking. In other words, if no one is searching for the target keywords, you will not get the results from your ads.
  Also if the volume of requests for this keyword combination is very high, you will have a lot of competitors showing ads for the exact same keywords. This will raise the price to show your ad and reduce your return on investment. Ideally find niches with some volume of requests and low competition. The secret for best ROI is to run several ads that are very niched on keywords combinations with low or moderate competition used by potential clients ready to buy.
  
  
• Keyword cost
  The bid specifications mainly determine ad placement for the keyword and the quality score that Google has provided to your ads. If the bids are greater and ads are of higher quality, they can win the best placement, so these high-competition keywords end up being more expensive. Following the platform guidelines you can bring the price down by providing highly relevant ads and landing pages, this way you can increase the chance to be on top of your competitors and even pay less than them. This has proven time and again to be the defining factor in making campaigns a success by having positive returns on investment.
  
  
• Structure of Account and Campaign
  You can keep your keywords together in a single bucket where you can display one ad for your aggregate log, but the keywords with high-volume can eat up your entire budget, and your quality score can go down. It is entirely essential to structure your Google ads accounts appropriately for better results.
  
  
• Copy
  In the end, when you are done with choosing the keywords and structuring your account, you have to write the good ads and "earn" relevant clicks. Have a good Hook in the beginning to make the people want to read the ad, have a strong reason to take action, for example, a big discount or problem solved. Your call to action to click on the ad will better work with a “read more” than “buy now” that could scare some away.