Search Engine Marketing

Search engine marketing (SEM) is a form of internet marketing that involves the promotion of websites by increasing their visibility in SERPs through optimization and advertising. SEM may use search engine optimization (SEO), which adjusts or rewrites website content to achieve a higher ranking in search engine results pages, or use pay per click (PPC) listings. SEM is a type of Internet marketing associated with the researching, submitting and positioning of a website within search engines to achieve maximum visibility and increase your share paid and/or organic traffic referrals from search engines.SEM involves things such as search engine optimization (SEO), keyword research, competitive analysis, paid listings and other search engine services that will increase search traffic to your site.

Benefits of SEM

Search delivers an active, targeted message to your online properties.

Individuals who see your SEM advertisements are actively searching for the keywords you indicated. For example, if you are in the baby carriage business, you would most likely advertise on the following keywords: Baby Carriage, Baby, Carriage, Babies, Active Baby, etc. Now if anyone searches any of the following words and you are paying enough per click, your advertisement will appear. Now here is the best part! As an advertiser, if you use the Pay-Per-Click methodology, you don’t pay unless a user clicks on the advertisement. Therefore, as a business, you only pay for people who are actively searching the key words your company selected and who found your advertisement relevant.

Search is the most popular medium for locating information.

74% of internet users perform local searches and of this percentage 82% of local searchers follow up offline via an in-store visit, phone call or purchase (TMP / comScore). From July 2007 to May 2008, Google has processed a total of 65.6 billion U.S searches. This is an average of 5.96 billion searches a month or roughly 20 million searches per month. Google represents 61.8% of search engines during this period. In other words, people are using search engines to find out about your company’s products or services.
Search Engine Marketing has one of the lowest costs per customer acquisition
SEM is a great marketing medium and very cost effective compared with other marketing mediums. As displayed by the graph, Customer acquisition is just below $10 while direct mail is highly ineffective at around $70 per customer. Granted the cost per customer can vary drastically based on the industry but this gives a good overview of the effectiveness of Search Engine Marketing compared to other direct marketing channels.