Search Engine Marketing (SEM): Ultimate Guide + Expert Tips
Search engines are a part of daily life. Set up your search engine marketing correctly, and it can also be a part of your daily business growth.
Search engine marketing, or SEM, is one of the most effective ways to grow your business and reach new customers.
While you must employ organic strategies to attract traffic over the long term, sometimes you can’t properly compete on the search engine ranking pages without putting money behind it — and that’s where SEM comes into play.
For instance, consider what happens when I type “hiking boots” into Google:
REI clearly has an effective SEO strategy, as its “hiking boots” page ranks first organically. However, paid advertising appears at the top and dominates search results.
With 49% of surveyed shoppers saying that they use Google to find new products, your business’s products or services must appear at the top of a SERP when a user searches.
This isn’t always possible organically, particularly when other businesses pay to ensure their products appear above yours. When this is the case, you must invest in a SEM strategy.
What is Search Engine Marketing (SEM)?
What is Search Engine Marketing (SEM)?
Search engine marketing is the process of using paid advertising to ensure that your business’s products or services are visible on search engine results pages (SERPs).
When a user types in a certain keyword, SEM enables your business to appear as a top result for that search query.
SEM is technically an umbrella term encompassing all search engine marketing, but it’s generally used to discuss paid search marketing. When speaking specifically about organic marketing, we’re talking about SEO.
As a content marketer, I’ve seen brands mistakenly turn to ads to solve their problems.
Short-sighted brands sometimes skip the step of developing and testing their offers and think that they can run enough ads to make up for the lack of development.
This is a costly and ineffective way to approach lead generation.
Ads are like fuel on a fire. Without any kindling (great offers), your fire is entirely dependent on you adding more and more gasoline to stay alive. Instead, why not add fuel and more logs to the fire?
You do so by developing a search engine marketing strategy that spans organic and paid advertising.
Take a free Google Ads course in HubSpot Academy.
SEO and SEM Compared
SEO and SEM are strategies that help your content appear in search results, but they have different functions.
SEO, or search engine optimization, allows your content to appear in organic search results. These listings show up on result pages based on Google’s analysis of their content and how it relates to search queries.
Most search engine results pages are organic search results:
Source:: HubSpot Blog
