SEM campaigns + Adwords campaigns

How does SEM (AdWords) work?

By using advertising programs like AdWords, search engines allow companies to bid on keywords whose search results appear to the side of SERP (search engine result page) under the "Sponsored Links" tab. Companies then pay only for each/every click on their link in these sponsored results.

SEM and AdWords budgets - because many keywords are popular (some are used by millions of web users on a daily basis) and because many competing firms bid on hundreds of keywords at a time, AdWords campaign budgets can require multi million dollar funds to cover the costs of all the clicks.

If your budget gets depleted, then your ad immediately disappears from SERP (search engine result page). As a result you immediately loose traffic from those keywords/phrases. That is why companies dedicate so much capital to their SEM budgets and that is why SEM has its benefits and drawbacks.

Of course not all companies have multi-million dollar SEM budgets. Many small to mid-sized companies can effectively compete with the giants by focusing their bidding tactics on less popular and less expensive keywords, or a smaller amount of keywords or more precise keywords. In so doing, small companies can attract a large percentage of web traffic to their sites, while bearing lower costs.

Why are SEM and AdWords popular?

Sponsored search results are a popular form of online advertising, because they allow companies that may not have well optimized sites to quickly appear in SERPs next to main results for multiple keywords used by internauts.

Simultaneously, SEM is one of a handful of marketing and advertising methods that allows a company to reach a client who is ready to buy and is actively searching for offers. Additionally, SEM provides a more precise method of measuring every dollar spent (and ROI) compared to conventional advertising.

Programs like AdWords are also useful for well optimized sites owned by corporations that have a large portfolio of services/products. These corporations want to reach the largest audience available, but without building dedicated pages to each of their product lines.

AdWords are also used by companies to measure, which keywords help attract most hot leads. Because SEM and AdWords are an expense, while sponsored results have lower CTR (click-through-rate) than organic (main) results, therefore keywords that proved to attract hot leads in AdWords are oftentimes traded to SEO campaigns that build dedicated pages for them.

This is done because proper SEO techniques result in high organic rankings and dedicated pages attract more traffic than sponsored search.

Can you combine SEM and SEO?

Trading tested and verified keywords back to SEO serves a double purpose: to cut down click costs and to increase CTR from a given phrase.

Thanks to SEO techniques, a phrase no longer is a cost to a company because a page gets naturally positioned for that phrase in organic results bypassing the need to bid. At the same time, by being in the main results, the page attracts more web users than a similar page located in sponsored AdWords results.

Oftentimes, the most sensible approach employed by site owners and companies is to combine SEM and SEO so that they supplement each other and work together. Together they attract the maximum percentage of web users to a given page.

Increase the potential of your adwords campaigns

If you are interested in increasing the effectiveness of your online ad spend, then read through our tips on creating effective AdWords campaigns or contact us for advice.

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.

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