How to Make SEM Work for You!
Did you know…
Nearly 14 billion online searches occur every month!
It’s no secret that Google rules the Search Marketing world while Yahoo! and Bing are trailing a close second. Because of the huge portion of the market they comprise, it’s safe to assume that typical PPC advertisers aren’t exactly anxious to spend their PPC ad dollars outside of these three engines. Not a bad strategy!
Obtaining website visitors through search engine tactics falls into two major categories: Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Here is a look at both of these important marketing approaches and how they can work together to your benefit.
SEM- Paid Search
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is the act of marketing a website via search engines by improving rank in organic/natural listings, paid/sponsored listings, or a combination of the both. SEM is usually accomplished through the use of what Google calls "sponsored links" and what Yahoo! calls "sponsor results." These are the listings that appear at the top or along the right column of a search results page, and are usually separated by a shaded box or border.
A successful SEM campaign includes the following:
- Search Engine Optimization – I’ll cover this in depth in the next article of this blog series! Stay tuned for it later this week.
- Search Engine and Directory Submission Management - A web directory in simplest form is a human indexed search engine. This practice entails submitting a site to a directory that indexes websites for the purpose of driving a large amount of quality traffic to the site.
- Paid Inclusion - This is a great option for dynamic websites which search engines cannot find. In order for potential visitors to easily find a website, it’s critical that the website’s pages are included in search engine databases. A Pay-For-Inclusion agreement means a website pays a search engine to include pages from the website in its database, or index. However, there is no guarantee by doing this that the website will be ranked higher than others. On the other hand, the site will be guaranteed that the pages submitted will be included in, and won’t be dropped from, the search engine's index for a specified period of time.
- Paid-Ad-Placement (PPC) -
- Expected ROI - According to a 2009 NY Times study, ROI should convert as follows:
Average value of visitor via Paid search Link: $2.38
Average value of visitor via Organic search result: $1.35
Printer-friendly version
