SEM, or search engine marketing, is the act of using paid strategies to increase search visibility. In the past, search engine marketing was a term used to describe both search engine optimization (SEO) and paid search.
Search engine marketing is also alternately referred to as paid search or pay-per-click (PPC).
Why Is SEM Important?
With an increasing number of consumers researching and shopping for products online, search engine marketing has become a crucial online marketing strategy for increasing a company’s reach.
The majority of new visitors to a website find it by performing a query on a search engine.
In search engine marketing, advertisers only pay for impressions that result in visitors, making it an efficient way for a company to spend its marketing dollars. As a bonus, each visitor incrementally improves the website’s rankings in organic search results.
Here's how it works:
- People search online for a product or service: they enter search terms (called keywords) into search engines.
- These searchers then find your ad: If the keywords in your ad match a search, your ad appears next to or above search results.
- Customers reach out to you: You can configure your ad so that people have the option to call you, visit your website, or go right to your door.
Differences between SEO and SEM
As we have seen, both SEO and SEM seek to improve the positioning of a website in search engines, such as Google. But there are several differences between them:
- The most obvious difference is the type of investment they require. There is a stereotype that "SEO is free," but this is not exactly true. Getting a web page capable of occupying the top positions in search results requires time, effort, and a budget.
- The position that your website will occupy in the search engine results pages is also different. Ads from Google Ads occupy a band at the top, while organic search results fill the central space.
- The type of content we work with is different between both strategies. SEO is based on creating quality content, usually in longer formats. Meanwhile, SEM has ads with a very small number of characters.
- Finally, the time investment is different, where SEM is sought to obtain results in the short/medium term, while SEO is a medium/long term bet.
Conclusion
Search engine marketing or SEM has great potential to help companies achieve their goals in a quick and scalable way. To get the most out of it, it is ideal to have experts who have extensive experience positioning brands in Google. If you want to take advantage of all the benefits of search engine marketing for your brand, get in touch with Vidya Corporation!