Beginner’s Guide to SEM

What is SEM? – SEM is the acronym for Search Engine Marketing. The goal of SEM is to obtain traffic and visibility for your website or business via ad placement on one or more of the major search engines. Most SEM experts solely utilize Google Adwords, a paid service. There are search engines other than Google, namely Bing, Baidu, Yahoo and Yandex. However, most businesses focus their efforts on Google which stakes a dominant 92% market share in the search engine arena.

In addition to SEM, there is Search Marketing which focuses on obtaining traffic and visibility for your website or business via search engines. Confused? Don’t be! Search Marketing utilizes methods which don’t require direct payment to the search engine itself. Although, you will likely pay a Search Marketing expert to perfect aspects of your website and its content in order to optimize search results, thus resulting in higher traffic and visibility for your site.

How can SEM help my website?

Savvy website owners will employ both Search Engine Marketing and Search Marketing to deliver the traffic and visibility they need to succeed in today’s dynamic online marketplace. You could attempt to “do it yourself” and try to put together Google Adwords campaigns and try to perfect your website’s Search Marketing potential. However, if you don’t really know the latest techniques and marketing strategies, your time and money will be wasted. It’s best to hire an expert in both areas to boost your traffic and crucial placement in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages).

If you wish to run an ad campaign to boost the traffic to your website, an SEM expert will work with you to format the best strategy and follow the campaign through. This will include consulting with you to set goals, coordinating design of a separate landing page to convert traffic to perform a desired action (if needed), analyzing keyword data, developing ad text which will be placed on the search engines and analyzing results.