Search engine marketing (SEM) is the practice of getting your website to appear on top of search engine results pages (SERPs) so that you can drive more traffic to your site and convert that traffic into leads or sales. SEM encompasses a wide range of techniques designed to get your business and its products in front of as many people as possible, including paid search, organic search, email marketing, social media marketing, and more. Here’s everything you need to know about SEM.
Increase Traffic
The biggest reason most businesses turn to search engine marketing is because it’s cheap. They know that if they want more traffic, they can’t afford a lot of options. Luckily, even if you’re strapped for cash, there are plenty of ways that you can boost your web presence with almost no out-of-pocket costs (apart from perhaps some typing). In fact, some of them don’t cost anything at all. Here are a few great ways to get traffic for free. There are many reasons why small business owners might not use social media. Maybe they just aren’t convinced that their customers are on social media yet, or maybe they have been warned about privacy concerns in using social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter. Perhaps their website isn’t set up well for content sharing, or maybe it doesn’t make sense to pay for advertising when their audience hasn’t found them organically through Google searches yet.
Improve Brand Awareness
When it comes to marketing your business, having a strong brand identity should be at the top of your list. Marketers spend big bucks on campaigns designed to improve brand awareness because they know that if people can recognize and remember their company, they’re more likely to get repeat business. Social media users are more likely than any other age group (21 percent compared with 15 percent of all adults) to follow brands online, so using social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram is a no-brainer way of improving brand awareness among people. And these days it’s not just about looking good—it’s also about being green.
Increase Customer Engagement
To kickstart search engine marketing for your business, you need a good keyword list. What are keywords? They’re phrases that describe what your business does, how it does it, who you do it for (and who you’d like to serve), etc. Think of them as search terms—the words people will type into Google or other search engines when they want information about a topic that’s relevant to your business.
Cost-Effective Solution
The great thing about search engine marketing is that it’s not an expensive solution. There are multiple ways to run SEM campaigns, but since businesses can get off with a relatively low cost for a high return on investment, more companies choose to use these services as opposed to traditional advertising options like radio and television ads. This can cut costs even further. For example, Google Ads allows you to set your budget per day instead of making one lump sum payment upfront; so if you only have $20 available for a particular campaign, you can set that amount aside each day instead of having it all spent at once.
