Search Engine Marketing (SEM).
What is Search Engine Marketing?
Search engine marketing is paying for prime placement on a search engine results page. All search engines have different pricing models for placement and keywords. Some search engines get you more traffic but don’t have the same quality consumer to match up to your product. The paid ads are highlighted above the main search results and also are on the right column as in the screenshot below.
Some companies SEM spends are ridiculously large and will throw money around to price out competition. This makes it harder for a small business with a competing product to stand up against a mega companies big budget. With CPC (Cost per click) a company pays the search engine for a sponsored search result listing when the link is clicked. The cost varies since you bid on the terms/keywords you want to appear high in ranking for.
This brings us back to why you need to optimize your site for organic results (non-paid search engine results). The more your site is search engine optimized, the less your spend needs to be for paid advertisements. There are other ways of competing with the big companies. If they are not bidding on their own brand name, it’s fair game for you to bid on their name and have the ad link to your site.
Although this is becoming more common and sometimes may work to get traffic to your site, the conversion for this type of traffic is questionable as to the user was searching for a specific name and assumes they will land at that specific site. I would suggest against this strategy unless a specific business is taking away your traffic by doing this.
Writing specific keyword rich content for advertisements is where you can get ahead of the competition if you do your homework. Researching keywords using free online tools and studying competitors advertisements using their weaknesses against them is a great strategy.
Why Should You Use Search Engine Marketing?
Search Engine Marketing helps drive traffic to your site quickly and easily. It used to be a cheaper form of advertising but now with a saturated market, keyword bidding has gotten out of control. One option you can take is to use Search Engine Marketing purely for a branding strategy. Bidding on low cost keywords that are related to your market to associate your name with that particular keyword is one strategy.
