- SEM campaigns +
AdWords Campaigns - Measuring SEM effects:
what, when and how? - What to avoid in SEM:
common mistakes
SEM BENEFITS
SEM advantages: when to use SEM?
The main advantage of SEM is the immediacy with which a website can appear in sponsored search results. Accordingly, SEM helps your website quickly attract numerous visitors, who are actively searching for services/products similar to yours.
SEM assists in
- Raising sales
- Online promotion/advertising via search engines
- Increasing ROI of every ad dollar spent
- Improving the effectiveness of your website in attracting traffic
- Research and testing of new keywords and keyterms
How SEM raises sales?
Simply put, by bidding on popular keywords and winning, your website will appear in sponsored search results for that keyword. By appearing at the top of sponsored search results, your website will probably attract anywhere from 1-7% of all web users searching via that keyword.
Even though 1-7% conversion may not sound impressive, consider that if that keyword is used by 5,000 webusers daily and you bid on five such keywords, then monthly you can look to attract between 7,500 - 52,500 web users to your site. That is a fair amount of web traffic, with a large portion of which you will be able to convince to buy from you via persuasive content.
SEM and online promotion via search engines
SEM is an effective method of online promotion and advertising in search engines. Thanks to a large portfolio of search engine services (email, news feeds, millions of websites eager to cooperate) as well as programs like AdSense, a link ad of your website can appear in a mailbox or within the content of a page read by a web user. In effect, your website's ad link will appear everywhere the content read by an internaut matches your site's topic and proposition.
As a result, SEM campaigns manage to emit your ads not only in their appropriate context, but also only at a time and place when a web user is immersed in that content.
SEM increases ROI and the effectiveness of you website
This is especially true of AdWords. Thanks to AdWords, every dollar spent is a dollar spent solely on clicks to your ad link by a web user.
If you are running an AdWords campaign on your own, then your money isn't diluted to anything else other than attracting visitors to your website. With AdWords you have the certainty that you are only paying for actual visits to your website, rather than general emissions of your ads. Thanks to that, you can direct all of your efforts to building appropriate content that will help you convert that traffic while raising your ROI.
There exists of course the possibility of 'click-fraud' (a situation where your competition repetitively clicks on your ads in order to deplete your AdWords budget before actual clients/web users can click on them), but this is a problem that is actively combated by Google and becoming less serious.
SEM helps evaluate the true worth of each keyword
SEM helps you determine whether there's a need to create new pages for your products and whether there is value in targeting new keywords.
With SEM you won't spend your time on writing new code, creating new content filled with keywords and optimizing pages solely for one product. Thanks to SEM you won't begin these activities while unsure of whether there is anyone searching for these products using such keywords. SEM will help you verify all assumptions prior to all work commencing.
With AdWords, all you need to do is bid on a chosen keyword list and measure for some time:
- how many visitors actually landed on that page using those keywords
- what percentage of those visitors actually bought your product/service
In order to carry out such measurements, it is best to create at least one dedicated landing page for tested keywords/services/products.
By testing a landing page with AdWords, you can evaluate whether there is value in spending time and money on preparing optimized pages for each keyword. If your analysis shows that there is value in such an effort, then you can utilize SEO services to optimize and position such a page in search engine's organic (main) results. By positioning a page in organic results (moving it away from SEM and toward SEO efforts) you will attract more users while cutting AdWords costs.
Unsure where to start?
Contact us for a consultation. Have SEO Magma answer any question you might have about SEM and about building successful AdWords campaigns.
If the ideas presented above are unfamiliar to you, then we invite you to read the Purpose of website positioning: how to use SEO and SEM where we explain SEO, SEM and the differences between them in greater detail.