Search Engine Marketing or SEM is the process of marketing your website so that it achieves high good quality traffic. SEM marketing should not just increase the traffic to your site but should deliver a high percentage of these visitors who actually make purchases.
SEM is slightly different to SEO (search engine optimisation) as most SEO strategies are purely aimed at organic search engine results while SEM can make use of many marketing strategies to increase awareness of your website in the marketplace.
SEM strategies will combine a mix of organic search engine ranking improvement as well as pay per click marketing strategies and even an analysis of the content of your website among other marketing strategies.
You may be wondering why you need to bother with SEM; the answer is simple your website is competing against literally thousands of others to attract customers and make sales. If you had a brick and mortar business you would advertise, and it is equally important to advertise your website. A good analogy is that you have the only coffee shop in a small town – you won’t need to advertise much.
Now imagine you are one of the thousands of establishments that sell coffee in New York City, you will need a way to stand out from the crowd and attract customers. Your web site has as much competition as the coffee shop in New York possibly more as your customers can potentially source your product or service from providers all over the world.
Search Engine Marketing or SEM will help you to ensure that your website is advertised to its best potential – that you receive the highest return on your investment (ROI) for your advertising dollar. ROI is not just measured by increased traffic; an effective SEM strategy should drive paying customers to your website. Increased traffic is of absolutely no benefit to your business if it does not result in increased sales revenue.
Your SEM strategy should look at getting you the best value for money keywords, keyword phrases and pay per click advertising that will attract people who have a definite interest in buying your product or service. A good SEM strategy should also focus on the content of your website and ensure that it is attracting searchers and is optimised to be found using as many search terms relevant to your product as possible.
You need to be able to advise people that have a problem that you can provide the solution. For example if I did not know what SEM was I may have searched something like ‘make web site more popular’. (Using these types of keyword phrases will not only advertise your website to a market you have not tapped before but must also be cheaper.)
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