5 Benefits of search engine marketing for your. business (2)

Many business owners have heard of Search Engine Marketing (or SEM) at some point. It’s a well-known method for driving traffic to your website or social media accounts. But what are the tangible advantages of implementing Search Engine Marketing in your small business? That is what we will be answering in today’s article.

What is Search Engine Marketing?

While the phrase was used to refer to both organic and paid search operations like search engine optimization (SEO), it’s considered distinct from SEO nowadays.

In today’s culture, SEM (search engine marketing) is a digital marketing method for improving a website’s presence on search engine results pages via paid advertising and high-quality website content.

Here are three important aspects of SEM that you should consider:

Pay-Per-Click 

Competitive bidding is at the heart of paid advertising. When users search for a specific term, you can make the search engine prioritize your adverts by using PPC. Google will charge you for each time someone clicks on your ad.  

The expense is referred to as “cost per click” (CPC). The higher your bid, the higher your position in the advertisements will be.  It’s important to remain competitive in this aspect of SEM.

Quality Score

The Quality Score determines whether or not an ad is relevant to the user’s search.

It will employ a complicated algorithm to determine whether or not your site is relevant to the search phrase. Essentially, this is how you know if your site is the first result on Google.

The click rate, landing page quality, and the connected Google account’s reputation all factor into the algorithm.  It gets a low-quality score if it finds that it’s just a site trying to pack keywords for a hit, for example.  Vice versa, it will up your quality score if it finds good content.

Ad Copy

What is the algorithm’s ranking of your Quality Score? As previously said, the landing page’s quality is critical. Ad copy is the actual content of your website. It should be both entertaining and educational. A high CTR is the result of strong ad copy (Click-Through-Rate). 

CTR refers to the number of individuals who notice your ad and click on it. A high CTR indicates a positive Quality Score. As a result, you get a discount on the click from the search engine. While playing the system is a must, your content should be equally good.

Benefits of SEM 

SEM strategies are a must for any business website, primarily for the following benefits:

Improves Site Traffic

Your ads on search engine pages are often the first time leads will see your business. An effective ad copy can divert a lot of traffic to your site. While SEO strategies are necessary, a healthy push with paid SEM tactics goes a long way. After all, everybody else is using SEO too, and you need an edge.

Paying for ads helps your SEO content get boosted over similar quality competitors. A daily budget you feel comfortable with should be allotted early on. With the proper planning, SEM gives your web content a head start. For example, you could go for conversion tactics (targeting new leads) or click maximization (improving overall traffic). Once that is done, your website will be able to generate SEO traffic much more organically.  Do you want an SEO game plan? Contact us today!

Measures Marketing Performance

Ad campaign success is very difficult to measure outside of the digital world. So many factors and results make the task Herculean, and oftentimes, not worth the effort. Thankfully, SEM tools come pre-packaged with all the surveys, metrics, and data analysis tools you need. 

You still have to research which keywords performed best, which sections of your site have the most feedback, and how often people click through your web pages. All that aside, it is infinitely easier than the manual method ad campaigns had to suffer through back in the day.  Google Ads also has the very neat feature of creating in-depth reports that include:

  • Clicks
  • Cost per click
  • Conversions
  • Conversion Rate
  • Ad Frequency

-and more!

Remarkets To Core Audience

Remarketing is a self-sufficient benefit wherein display ads show relevant information to captured leads. This enables you to regain any leads you may not have had business with for a while.  Remarketing is not a complex activity. All you need is a reliable way of dropping browser cookies from your audience.

A good example of remarketing: Let’s say “John” visits a furniture store’s website, and lingers a bit on a particular sofa. They do not purchase it for now due to budget reasons. However, they go to another website a few days later, and the site just so happens to have an ad for the furniture they liked from the store. Now that they have cash, they purchase it. That is what remarketing does best.

Brand Awareness

Sometimes, all you need is for people to remember your business name. They may not click on you at first, but if your brand is always near the top of the results, you have a hook in them. Once you provide a service that they can’t find anywhere else, they will go to you. 

Combine SEM with other forms of advertising. Include links to your website on all physical and digital flyers. Lastly, you could run YouTube ads and target individuals who engage in a specific niche or content.  In tandem, this will elevate your brand above the sea of competitors.

Lead Generation

By targeting new keywords and demographics, SEM manages to significantly increase the number of new leads from your ads. Not only that, the tools show you how to recreate these leads, via the where and when of the ad clicks happening. 

From there, supplement your ad campaign with calls to action, surveys, and other dynamic forms of advertising. Lead generation is much easier with a strong SEM strategy behind your back. 

Do you want an SEO game plan? Contact us today!

Lark Begin is a digital marketer from Ottawa, Canada. Lark is an SEO Master, PPC expert and content writer. She helps many small businesses get ranked on Google each day.