Search Engine Marketing ?
Search engine marketing is also referred to as SEM. So, search engine marketing is strictly paid ads on search engine results pages, also referred to as the SERP.
SEO Vs SEM
Search engine optimization (SEO) is not the same as SEM.
So, SEM involves you paying for advertisement, paying for placement on search engine results pages. where a search engine optimization, you’re looking for organic traffic. When it comes to SEO. when it comes to sem, you’re repaying for that traffic. So, any time you’re targeting keywords in a search engine and your ad shows up that is search engine marketing.
Any ad that you see shows up on google, on bing, other search engines that search engine marketing. it’s not searching engine optimization. Because these are actual advertisements that are showing up on the search engine results pages.
Some popular search engine marketing channels really anywhere that people can go and search keywords. Any search engine, where people can go look up things and there are ad placements is gonna be considered an SEM channel. So, Google AdWords, Bing ads are the two huge ones.
Search Engine Marketing Examples
Pinterest ads
are one so when you consider someone going to Pinterest. You can target keywords as an advertiser. It’s really just a big search engine. It’s just returning pictures, it’s returning visual images rather than words and rather than results. So, definitely Pinterest ads would be a search engine marketing channel.
Yahoo Gemini
Actually, Yahoo doesn’t have a great advertising platform. But, their Gemini platform is their SEM channel. We don’t really use it, because I’ve never been able to get great results from it.
YouTube search ads
Another example kind of unique YouTube search ads. so if you go to youtube and in the search box, search anything, you’ll see a couple of ads pop up. So, these are all SEM ads. Because YouTube is a search engine when someone goes in and types in. You know something into YouTube and their ad shows up that’s considered an SEM ad. Because it is a retargeting ad with their advertisement through a search engine. So, just some quick examples here.
Google Ads
In Google, if you type in accounting software. Every single thing you see on this page with an ad link with the result is an ad. These are all search engine marketing ads. See the below example.
So, next, if we see a search for football cleats. So, here you can see different google shopping ads and these are all advertisers. These are all advertisers that are putting their ads up through you know the Google Shopping platform and then they can actually show image ads or they used to refer to as product listing ads. They’re considered shopping ads. so these are SEM ads.
Bing ads
So if you search for travel deals, for example, every single thing on this page besides the related searches is a search engine marketing ad. So, these are all different SEM ads and the top booking website is what appears to have the highest ad rank for this particular search.
Which means they have the highest quality score and the highest bid. So they’re probably bidding may be slightly higher may be similar to these other advertisers. probably slightly higher and they also have really good quality scores .so you see travel deals it’s a very good ad travel deal.
So, last but not least Pinterest ad example. so if you go into Pinterest and search pretty much anything but we just search pendant lights. Here you can see an ad. so these are all promoted ads and Pinterest is a search engine. so it’s an SEM Ad.
So, search engine marketing is paid ads on search engine results pages. Do not be confused with SEO (search engine optimization). Because they’re not the same thing SEM involves you paying for placement in search engines because people are looking at certain strategies every day. It’s basically a huge area without inventories.
In conclusion, SEM is very crucial for any company to drive traffic, increase their sales conversions. For any company that wants fast results in terms of sales, leads and conversions SEM is a very powerful method. These are the benefits of search engine marketing.
