Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is a discipline under Internet Marketing that spans both marketing and performance analysis under it. Search engine marketing is known to be the task of marketing a product or content using paid promotions that appear on search engine results pages (SERPs). Content managers experiment on keywords that users of websites like Google and Yahoo might search when looking for certain products or services, which provides the website an opportunity for their ads to appear along with the results for those search strings.
The ads of the website or product are also called by the term pay-per-click ads which come in different formats. Some are small ads, some are text-based ads, whereas others, such as product listing ads are more visual and pictorial, product-based advertisements that allow users to see relevant information as a brief representation, such as reviews and price. The biggest strength of Search Engine Marketing is that it provides the company with the opportunity to publish their advertisements in front of interested users who are ready to use the product or content immediately. No other digital marketing form can do this, which is why search engine marketing is so efficient and such a powerful way to grow and generate revenue to the company. On a general note, Search Engine Marketing means paid search marketing, a process where the company pays to show their ads along with the search results. But Search Engine Optimization (SEO), is different and is an integral part of SEM because in SEO the company does not pay for user traffic and clicks instead they earn a rank in the SERP by having legitimate and useful content for a given keyword search.
Both SEO and SEM are important parts of online marketing techniques. SEO is a way to transfer organic traffic to the website with respect to the quality of the on-page content, while search engine marketing is more like a cost prone way to transfer traffic to the website. Keyword Analysis or Research is another important strategy in SEM. To decide on which keywords to use in the search engine marketing strategies, it is important to perform comprehensive research as part of keyword analysis strategy. Identification of keywords that are related to the content and that matches to the users search for products or content can be done through tools like Keywords Everywhere which shows the most relevant keywords with search volume as well.
With an increasing number of users researching for content or products online, search engine marketing has become an essential strategy for increasing a company’s traffic and ranking in SERP. The main idea in search engine marketing is the company only pays for impressions in SERP that result in organic traffic, making it an effective way for a company to spend its marketing costs. As an addition, each user’s visit incrementally improves the website’s rankings in organic search results. Search engine marketing helps in reaching users at exactly the right time when they are open to new content. Unlike most of the digital marketing techniques, search engine marketing is non-intrusive and does not interrupt the tasks of the on-page content. With the increasing demand to learn an efficient strategy like SEM many colleges across India provide MBA Courses in various Digital Marketing disciplines. With its growing demand each Digital Marketing has already taken over other naïve forms of marketing with such effective strategies.
