SEM - search engine marketing

Search Engine Marketing

SEM (search engine marketing) refers to any activity for your website that requires you to pay for leverage to the search engines. The area that you may be most familiar with is the PPC camapigns. Read below for more information.

 

What is Pay-Per-Click (PPC)?

Pay-Per-Click is a paid form of search engine marketing (advertising), most popular with Google and Yahoo. The concept is fairly simple. Businesses bid to be placed at or near the top of the search results for particular keyword phrases. The bidding is done on a “per-click” basis, meaning that a company pays a specific amount every time the engine sends them a visitor.

Advantages

Search Engine Marketing campaigns have some advantages over traditional search engine optimisation. First of all, they require no changes to a current site’s content or look to obtain top positions, just a willingness to pay. Also, the implementation of a pay-per-click campaign is relatively quick- it can take just a few minutes to start getting targeted traffic, versus sometimes months for standard SEO campaigns.

Limitations

Of course, there are limitations to this type of advertising. New bids can lower the positions of other firms, and many will react by raising their bid to regain a previous ranking. Monitoring of positions becomes crucial.

THE PROCESS

Determining Visitor Worth
Determining how much each website visitor is worth is vital to the success of a pay-per-click campaign.

If it costs $50 in click throughs to make a $40 sale, the campaign has failed. The formula is relatively simple, but some specific historical data is necessary. In the most rudimentary form, it is the profit from the website over a given period divided by the number of total visitors for the same period.

If a site netted $1000 in profits from goods or services in a given period, and there were 2,000 visitors during the same period, each would theoretically be worth 50 cents (profit divided by visitors). But this is only the breakeven point.

Depending on the desired profit margin, the optimal price to pay per click would probably be something much less than 50 cents. Popular keyword phrases can often run more than this, so it then makes sense to bid less money on less popular terms to pay an acceptable amount per visitor.

Selecting keyphrases for search engine marketing

As with typical search engine optimisation, keyword research is critical to the success of a PPC campaign. Unlike typical search engine optimisation, there aren’t practical limits on the number of phrases to target. Usually, there is no extra cost to add as many keyword phrases as possible. This makes the keyword selection process easier, since there is not a good deal of resources committed to optimising a site for a particular keyword set. Under-performing keywords, while still an annoyance, do not cost extra (except for the time involved in setting up the account).

Writing descriptions for search engine marketing

With a typical search engine description, the object is to entice as much traffic into a site as possible in the hopes of converting that traffic into customers. With PPC, a different approach is mandated. It is undesirable to pay for unlikely prospects, so the description is designed to eliminate the “tire kickers” while attracting highly targeted traffic. For this reason, the description should describe exactly what the business offers. At the same time, proven marketing copy techniques should be employed to insure that the description is enticing enough to attract ideal prospects.