SEM is stands for search engine marketing, which involves tasks that help search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, and Bing find and rank a website. In other words, it’s the things you can do to make sure your website appears in search engine results when someone searches for information related to your business.
It’s also known by many other names. To answer the question, what is search engine marketing (SEM)?, it’s important to make note of them. People may use them interchangeably. And you may find you know more about SEM than you think you do.
It’s also called:
-Paid search ads
–Paid Advertising (which just assumes you know it’s on searches)
–PPC (Pay-per-click)
This advertising involves paying to have search engines display your website’s promotion in or alongside search results. For example, Google’s Adwords program will display your ad at the top or right side of the search results page (placement depends on many factors including keywords and quality of ad). Google will also feed your ads to websites running its Adsense program. There are other types of PPC search engine marketing, such as Facebook Ads. In PPC advertising, you pay each time someone clicks on your offer. Paid search differs from organic search in that you’re paying to have your website or offer displayed higher in search results.
The advantage of paid search is that you can have your website listed on the first pages in a prominent spot on Google and other search engines. However, showing up is only part of the process.
You need to create an ad that not only leads to clicks, but to sales or whatever result you’re looking for. If you don’t know what you’re doing, it’s possible to write an ad that people are drawn to and click on, however, you don’t make sales.
Since you pay per click, and clicks can add up quickly, you can lose money. For example, if you pay 50 cents per click and 100 people click the ad per day, that will cost you $50 for the day. If you let the ad run for the month, you’ll pay $1,500 ($50 a day multiplied by 30 days) for those clicks. The point is to make sure your paid ad not only gets clicks, but turns those clicks into income.
What do you think?