SEM stands for “search engine marketing.” It is the process of combining SEO and PPC strategies to create a holistic internet marketing strategy that drives traffic and visibility through search engines based on a user’s search query.
Originally called “search engine marketing,” the shorter phrase “search marketing” is often used as the umbrella term for SEO and PPC.
But today, much of our industry defines SEM as digital advertising strategies where you pay to have your website featured on the search engine result pages (SERPs).
SEO and PPC are both forms of marketing on search engines. Organic search marketing and paid search marketing are different channels, but the goals and platforms are ultimately the same.
Why is SEM, search engine marketing, important?
SEM is important because it is a data-driven approach to targeting your audience across all online channels and touchpoints.
Search marketing is an effort on any search engine. This means you should care about “other” search engines, from YouTube to TikTok to Amazon to Apple to Yelp.
Anything that can be searched for can be optimized. If it’s a platform that lets users search, and there’s advertising on it – that’s SEM.
When marketers combine SEO and PPC, it creates an all-inclusive integrated approach to internet marketing that drives results.
Auberge Resorts saw over a 126% return on investment from PPC and an 86% increase in organic traffic when merging SEO and PPC into one strategy.
An energy supplier increased website traffic by 71% and received 86% more leads in Google Ads when pairing SEO and PPC together.
Coney Island Picnic needed a new website with ecommerce capability. With a new website redesign, the website ranked for over 775 keywords and went from 0 organic traffic sessions to 2,500 organic sessions per month in the first six months.
On the paid side, the highest ROAS of 22.68x came from branded search campaigns, sparking increased brand awareness.
Overall, Coney Island Picnic launched a new brand and sold over 1,000 products in just 90 days by combining SEO and PPC.
Combining SEO and PPC is like adding fuel to the fire of your SEM strategy. You gain better insights into conversion rates, keyword performance, and estimated traffic.
Seven types of SEM
When SEM originated in the early 2000s, SEM = PPC + SEO.
Today, SEO and PPC have matured and grown into subsets of strategies.
Now, there are seven types of search engine marketing – organic, paid, local, voice, image, shop, and social search.
And there are eight types of PPC ads – paid search, display, remarketing, video, social, shopping, Gmail, and Amazon advertising.
SEO
SEO stands for search engine optimization. SEO is the method used to improve the overall quality of a web page to search engines. You’re earning traffic through unpaid or free search engine results.
SEO is just limited to search engines like Bing and Google. SEO is for all search engines like YouTube, Pinterest, Amazon, TikTok, etc.
PPC
PPC, pay-per-click, is when an advertiser pays each time a user clicks on their ad. You’re buying traffic through paid search listings.
Search engines can range from Google and Bing to Amazon to TikTok or YouTube.
What is the difference between SEM vs. SEO vs. PPC?
If we’re considering the original description of SEM, SEM is an internet marketing strategy combining both paid and organic tactics to increase your website’s visibility in search engines.
SEO is the “organic” part of SEM. SEO is sometimes called “free” traffic driven by relevant content and healthy website performance.
PPC is the “paid” part of SEM.
The key differences between SEO and SEM are:
- SEM requires both SEO and PPC to be called SEM. PPC is transparent and must state it is paid advertising. PPC is shown displaying the word “Ad” at the top.
- PPC requires payment for every click (CPC, cost-per-click) or impression (CPM, cost-per-thousand impressions).
- PPC can immediately show ROI, whereas SEO is a long game.
- PPC is faster to test than SEO.
Are there any similarities between SEM vs. SEO vs. PPC?
There is a lot of crossover between SEM, PPC, and SEO.
Both SEO and PPC share these common similarities in creating an SEM strategy:
- Increase the visibility of your website across search engines by optimizing your target audience and search queries.
- Drive higher-quality traffic to your website by encouraging searchers to click on your website through paid ads or organic search results.
- Deep knowledge and expertise in keywords and target audience to better understand the intent behind the search query and how your competition looks at the search term.
- Requires A/B testing and experimentation to support a long-term strategy and ROI.
3 Essential Methods For Paid Advertising Success
The rate at which marketers are investing in paid advertising speaks volumes about its potential to maximize ROI;
Start by defining your overall digital marketing objectives and confirming your budget (obviously the more flexibility you have the better, but you can still achieve valuable, measurable results with a small amount of money), and then decide which of the paid advertising options outlined below will help you to achieve your goals!
Search (And Destroy The Competition!)
Paid search advertising serves as a valuable and malleable channel to generate leads and target customers. If used discerningly, a paid search strategy has the power to complement and enhance your organic search performance, boost your ranking, and maximize your visibility to your target audience.
For the purposes of this section, I’ll be focusing on Pay-Per-Click (PPC); it’s an effective advertising model because it can be adapted to suit any budget size and can still deliver results. If you research and execute a considered keyword strategy, and take advantage of PPC’s exceptional measurability to figure out what works and doesn’t work, you can easily optimize your paid search campaign.
You can leverage paid search to drive more traffic to your site and ultimately acquire more customers in a few simple steps:
A Strong Keyword Strategy
The very obvious first step of any keyword strategy (unless you’re some sort of PPC maverick) is thorough research. Using Google as an example, you can use the Keyword Planner, and the Search Terms report available in AdWords to gain insight into the performance of particular keywords, search volume data and generate ideas for new keywords.
When it comes to choosing keywords, there’s often a strong temptation to set keywords to exact match to target a specific audience, with the belief that they will be more receptive to advertising and consequently more likely to convert. Instead, opt for a combination of broad and phrase match to drive traffic and use exact match for well-converting keywords as sparingly as possible.
Set Your Budget
For each search campaign you build, you can decide how much money Google can spend to display your ads. Utilize the Keyword Planner to help you plan your budget and get detailed click and cost performance forecasts based on your desired keywords and targeting options; it’s a great way to gain a high-level understanding of the potential cost of driving traffic to your website.
You can set a daily budget and cap it, in order to manage your spending wisely until you have a more detailed insight into your campaign performance. Once you do, you can start to adjust your allocation, based on more than just the Keyword Planner estimates. If your keywords have a high CTR and conversion, and if your leads are high quality, then you can begin to invest more budget (if available) into your campaign. If not, you can continue to drip-feed your funds to AdWords and experiment with your targeting options and keywords, be they branded search terms and highly targeted keywords (for leads who are ready to purchase), or broader keywords that will cost less and raise awareness. It might take some time, but with a little analysis and perseverance, you will find your winning formula!
Ad Optimization
When it comes to text ads for PPC, you have a limited number of characters with which to convince your customers to click, so in this instance, first impressions are everything! To ensure those customers convert, you need to achieve maximum impact with a minimum copy. When you’re creating your text ads, never forget that they need to be highly targeted, with a persuasive and relevant message.
A text ad is generally composed of:
- A title (25 characters), which is highlighted in blue on the first line of the ad
- A display URL (37 characters)
- 2 description lines (35 characters each)
Google can combine the title, URL, and one description line into a text banner, but either way, it can be a challenge to convey yourself effectively with this character constraint. To maximize the effectiveness of your text ads, a good rule of thumb is to include relevant keywords (avoid stuffing!), an enticing Unique Selling Point (what can you offer your target audience that would make them want to click?), and at least two explicit Calls-To-Action (do you want them to call? Email? Visit your website?)
Put Yourself On Display
Poor display advertising. Its reputation has suffered over the years, thanks to negative connotations brought about by interruptive, “spammy” banner ads that lacked any real context or value for their target audience. Users reacted with “banner blindness”, and as a result, the average CTR of display ads across all formats and placements is an underwhelming 0.06%.
That may sound like a damning statistic, but it doesn’t mean you should disregard digital display entirely. If implemented appropriately, display ads are an excellent platform for showcasing your products and brand across the internet; it’s somewhat revealing that in the US this year, digital display ad spending is set to eclipse search ad spending for the first time! Display advertising is perfect for creating awareness, building brand awareness, and consequently, trust. Depending on your overarching goals, you can decide how much budget you’d like to allocate to display.
In this section, I’ll be concentrating on how you can use the Google Display Network to your advantage, but you can leverage these tips for AOL (who carry Bing’s listings and ads), Yahoo, and across your display advertising activities in general.
Consider Your Targeting Options
One important thing to remember about display ads; they’re being served to an audience that is simply browsing the internet and hasn’t taken any steps whatsoever to seek out our products or brand. That’s why, as I’ve already said, display advertising can often be considered interruptive and irritating. The best way to alleviate any of this potential irritation is to consider your targeting options, so you can make sure your ads have the best chance of getting in front of people who actually want to see them.
Contextual Targeting: Otherwise known as keyword targeting, this option matches ads to sites on the Display Network using your selected keywords and topics. This means your ad will be shown on a website whose theme or concept is contextually relevant, to users whose activity on that site would indicate they’re likely to become a customer.
Placement Targeting: This option allows you to advertise on specific publisher sites; so you can decide exactly where you’d like your ads to appear. As with contextual targeting, this is a very focused targeting method, so you might want to start small with your budget to gauge your effectiveness before further investing.
Retargeting: Retargeting ads are served to users who have already visited your website after they have left your website. Retargeting is highly relevant as you are directing your ads at users who are more inclined to convert, though you will be targeting a lower volume of people.
Top tip: you can again take advantage of your account structure and use various ad groups to try out a mix of the above targeting options in combination with broader methods such as topic and interest targeting. Don’t forget to exclude irrelevant keywords, websites, and topic either! The more you experiment, the more likely you are to find what works best for you, so you can make the most of your budget.
Optimize and Scale Your Success
Monitoring the performance of your display ads is a fundamental part of understanding which ad formats and placements you should adopt; but beyond this analysis, there are other actions you can take to maximize the effectiveness of your paid advertising strategy, particularly from a conversion perspective.
You can use the AdWords Conversion Optimizer to acquire the most conversions based on a set target CPA, so you don’t have to manually adjust bids. An alternative, if you’d rather not use CPA, is Enhanced CPC (ECPC), which can help you get more value from your ad budget by automatically raising your bid when it seems more likely to lead to a sale or conversion.
Finally, Real-Time Bidding (RTB) is an efficient, scalable way to buy display ads. RTB works on the principle of auctioning an ad impression off individually to the highest bidder, so you can target your ads to a variety of websites, increase your reach and make better use of your budget!
Go Social
As organic posts on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other platforms compete to be displayed in user newsfeeds, paid promotion has rapidly become an essential component of any successful social media strategy, in order to gain valuable visibility in front of potential customers.
This means that there exists a largely untapped opportunity to engage and attract customers via social media.
As with all paid advertising, you will need to experiment, test and tweak to obtain the best results. Focus on the social media platforms your target audience leans towards most, start small in terms of budget, and slowly scale when you’ve discovered your winning formula.
