How can search engine marketing benefit your business?

What is Search Engine Marketing? Search engine marketing (SEM) is a form of Internet marketing that involves the promotion of websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results pages through optimization and paid advertising.

SEM may use search engine optimization (SEO) that adjusts or rewrites website content or uses special HTML tags to achieve a higher search engine ranking.

Search engine ranking refers to the position at which a particular site appears in the results of a search engine query. A site is said to have a high ranking when it appears at or near the top of the list of results.

SEM is also usually used to describe the immediate, money-backed portion of search engine marketing that commonly takes the shape of PPC (pay-per-click)/CPC (cost-per-click) search engine results page ads in one form or another.

Individuals who see your SEM advertisements are actively searching for the keywords you indicated. For example, the recent news story of the Former Transport minister Chirau Ali Mwakwere who shocked MPs when he admitted he identified the China Road and Construction Company which is to carry out a feasibility study of the Sh327 billion rail tender by just “goggling” and further went on and said he was satisfied it had the capacity to carry out the work.

Pay-Per-Click methodology

Now if anyone searches any of the following words like “Railway companies” and you are paying enough pay-per click, your advertisement will appear within the results page.

Now here is the best part! As an advertiser, if you use the Pay-Per-Click methodology, you don’t pay unless a user clicks on the advertisement.

Therefore, as a business, you only pay for people who are actively searching the key words your company selected and who found your advertisement relevant.

In terms of traffic and volume, as of July 2012, Google answers over 3 billion queries every day from users in 180 or more countries around the planet. That translates to at least 35,000 queries every second.

Compare that to a grand total of 3.6 million searches in Google’s first year of operation, and the scope of their exponential growth becomes apparent.

As of the year 2013, the annual number of Google searches was 2,161,530,000,000 and the average searches per day were 5,922,000,000.

Google’s handy Search Globe ‘experiment’ allows users to visualize the number of searches conducted globally every day by location. However you chart it, the rise in search traffic continues unabated.

Search Engine Marketing is a very cost effective way to grow a small business into a booming medium sized business, grow a medium sized business into a large business or increase profits for a large business.

SEM is one of the lowest costs per customer acquisition. SEM targets the individuals who are actively seeking information on your company’s products or services and is the most cost effective way of targeting this market.

Basically, with SEM you will build your brand. When your website is highly visible on search engines, it shows your prospects that your business is an authority brand.

If searchers see your website often, they will remember your brand. Even if they don’t need your product or service now, they will think about it in the future when they do.

SEM can provide extensive data on the responses to your campaign, meaning there’s a high level of analysis to support and develop the campaign! How cool is that?

The campaign can also be adjusted in response to the results that you’re finding, making it a very flexible form of advertising!

If your business is not actively pursuing Search Engine Marketing, you can be sure one of your competitors is and if they haven’t already, gaining market share could be yours. It’s clear that SEM will benefit your business and help with its growth and bottom line.

It is the quickest, easiest and most transparent means to helping your business’ success online! Visit a Digital advertising agency for more.