Leverage SEM to Hit the Jackpot in the Digital Marketplace

January 22, 2024 | Digital Marketing

Have you recently thought about buying a product online? Did you check the product on Google? The first few clicks available at the top must have been the brand that you have extensively trusted on. This is all about SEM (search engine marketing).

Basically, search engine marketing is a high-tension magnetic force that can potentially draw infinite visitors to your brand.

The better the SEM campaign, the better will be the success!

REALLY INTERESTING! Right?

So, let’s proceed with some detailed explanation of search engine marketing.

What is SEM?

Search engine marketing is basically making your product more discoverable on the internet.

Any practice that intends to scale up the exposure of your website, products, or services on SERP can be termed search engine marketing (SEM).

Are SEM and PPC the Same?

When we talk about the types or categories of search engine marketing, people often confuse SEM with PPC.

But are they synonymous? Absolutely NO!

Search engine marketing is a digital term that encompasses multiple marketing disciplines like SEO, PPC, content marketing, social media marketing (SMM), local SEO, and much more. Any action taken online that boosts up the visibility of your brand can be referred to as SEM.

PPC refers to paid internet marketing, where the advertisers pay a fee every time their ads get clicked. It is basically the method of buying the visits to your website, other than driving organic traffic to your brand.

Although modern digital marketers commonly take PPC as SEM, the in-depth marketing perspective of these two terminologies is entirely different. PPC is undoubtedly one of the integral parts of SEM but not SEM marketing as a whole.

SEM, often called a search marketing engine, is a pretty broad term in itself.

Fundamentals of Search Engine Marketing

Although there are many verticals that you have to sincerely work on, let’s discuss a few parameters that encapsulate the fundamentals of search engine marketing.

Keyword Research

Searching the targeted keywords is the foremost step of SEM or search engine marketing. When you know the exact terms that people are searching with to find the particular product and services, there is no scope for your campaign to get off-track.

The free keyword research tool of RankWatch can help you in this endeavor.

But how?

You need to log in to your RankWatch account or take a 14-day free subscription. Feed the respective keyword in the given column and click on the explore option.

The AI-driven feature of this tool would automatically come up with insights like keyword difficulty, CPC, competition, search volume trend, organic keyword suggestions, paid keyword suggestions, question-based keywords, keyword grouping, and much more.

These insights are the essential components of keyword analysis that make you understand the buying behavior, related search terms, and demographic preferences of the audiences.

Thus, now you have a full-fledged scope for drafting a search engine marketing campaign accordingly.

You just have to formulate the marketing campaign as per the closely related search terms. Eventually, your brand will gain high authority on the internet, leading to a higher accumulation of traffic either through organic or paid media.

Keyword Price

In case you are going for PPC, you need to analyze the price of keywords. This will help you plan a successful marketing campaign and calculate the tentative return on investment (ROI). Technically, the more competitive the keywords are, the higher will be the cost of bidding. So, you need to plan accordingly.

Now, as we discussed above, the free keyword research tool of RankWatch also gives you insight into the CPC value; you can use this facilitation to draft a better SEM campaign.

The process remains the same. You just have to log in to your RankWatch account, open the keyword research section, enter the targeted keyword, and click on the search option.

The exclusively free feature of RankWatch will offer you the CPC value of that particular keyword. Use it to drive your marketing team’s SEM strategy.

Market Target

This is to segment the market and make a fundamental base for your target audience. The target may vary, including location, time, devices, profession, industry, and other similar demography.

Ad Auctions

To feed an Ad in a search engine, you will have to participate in the Ad auction. The ad could be based on quality score, keywords, and other significant parameters that instigate the price of bidding.

What are the Benefits of Search Engine Marketing?

After knowing the fundamentals of search engine marketing, you must know about a few benefits that would invariably make you practice them.

So, some advantages of SEM are:

Converged Intention

SEM counts on an intent-driven strategy to attract customers. You just cannot hit around every Tom, Decan, and Harry to sell your brand.

Indeed, here, you segment the search engine market and specify the customers that hold a relatively higher possibility of purchasing your products and services.

Result-Driven Marketing

You have to acknowledge the notion that marketing in search engines is comparatively more result-driven than traditional marketing. Since it encapsulates both organic and paid volume, the sack of customers willing to pay for your product and services is understandably higher.

Real-Time Data Available

In old-school or traditional marketing, you are not able to check the real-time conversion rate. Meanwhile, in SEM, you can instantly fetch the data of customers who clicked your ad campaign and those who purchased your product or services.

Fast and Targeted

The performance visibility of SEM is faster than that of other marketing formats. With digital efforts to reach online customers via organic and paid media, marketing in search engines is very fast, targeted, and viable.

Best Practices of Search Engine Marketing

To structure the best search engine advertising strategy, you have to understand and learn a few best practices that will facilitate it.

Let’s get started.

Establish a Google Ad Account

The best practice of search engine marketing is to first establish a Google Ad account. It would help you to structure the campaign strategically as per the specific location, targeted keywords, and segmented audiences.

Incorporate the Right Keywords

After you establish your Google Ad account, it’s time to fetch, identify, and incorporate the right keywords. Nothing could be better than the utility of the right keywords at the right volume.

As we discussed above, the free SEO keyword research tool of RankWatch can help you to identify the online worth of a particular keyword.

Just feed the targeted keyword, given location, and click on the search option. The feature will offer you data like search volume, CPC, competition, and related keywords to make you understand whether to use the search terms in your campaign or not.

Eradicate Duplicity

Make sure that you don’t have any duplicity in the domain. Get a proper website audit, find all the persistent issues, and fix them to make your website totally accessible to users.

Here, you can use the site audit feature of RankWatch. It is simple, comprehensive, and easy to use. Besides, you also get a site score based on the issues existing on your website.

How to use it?

You just have to log in to your RankWatch account, set the domain URL as the new project, and click on the site audit option.

The tool will automatically crawl your site and offer you insights like HTTP status code distribution, duplicate pages, duplicate URLs, canonical conflicts, page depth, page response time distribution, and much more.

You just have to eradicate all these website duplicities to strengthen the foundation of your search engine advertising. The more you keep your domain away from these issues, the more effective your SEM campaign will be across the internet.

Write Ad Copy for SEM

Push your brand higher by writing compelling Ad copies for your marketing campaign. Optimize the headline, choose the display URL, place catchy product descriptions, place Ad extensions, and create better landing pages for your website.

Analyze Competitors

Analyzing the competitor’s website and evaluating their ad campaigns are other practices to boost the quality and productivity of your SEM.

You can observe their ad copies and successful strategies and try to replicate them in order to foster an efficient search engine marketing campaign for your brand. Thus, search engine marketing analysis is of great help.

The competitor analysis feature of RankWatch can help you to evaluate your successful market competitors.

This automated feature of RankWatch would instantly serve you insights like a list of competitors, ranking keywords, ranking URLs, top-notch snippets, top tags, and so on.

Now, how can these insights help you?

It’s simple! When you have the proactive information of your competitors, the keywords they use, and possible SEM strategies they implement, you can also replicate their marketing actions to be successful in the market.

Just follow the footsteps of your search engine market rivals, add up your own insights, and build your own strategy to surpass them in the respective marketplace.

Summing Up!

So, here we have discussed all points on search engine marketing, their fundamentals & benefits, and best practices to execute them.

So, next time you plan to encourage search engine marketing, don’t forget to use RankWatch.

Cheers!

Sahil Kakkar

Sahil is the CEO and Founder of RankWatch - a platform that helps companies and brands stay ahead with their SEO efforts in the ever growing internet landscape. Sahil likes making creative products that help in the automation of mundane tasks and he can spend endless nights implementing new technologies and ideas. You can connect with him and the Rankwatch team on Facebook or Twitter.