06 Aug Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

Tired of waiting for your SEO efforts to pay off? It might be time consider search engine marketing.

It can be impossibly frustrating to put a ton of time and money into building your brand and its site, only to realize that you aren’t even ranking on the first page yet…or the first three pages, for that matter. Unfortunately, while time, great technical knowledge, and some in-depth keyword research will eventually allow you to climb through the search engine results pages (SERPs), good search engine optimization (SEO) takes time. The good news is, search engine marketing (SEM) search engine marketing can help you skip a few steps and a lot of time. In this post, we’re going to take a close look at search engine marketing, how it’s different from SEO, and how to get started.

Search Engine Marketing vs SEO  

SEO and SEM: what’s the difference?

Until relatively recently, search engine optimization used to fall under the umbrella term “search engine marketing,” but both have become so complex that SEM and SEO now exist as two separate (but closely related) entities. Search engine optimization is focused on improving your site to increase your organic search engine rankings. SEO primarily revolves around placing keywords strategically throughout the site, link building, establishing site authority and using meta data that’s crawlable by Google.

Search Engine Marketing Platforms

Most search engines have an ad platform for search engine marketing. The most well-known (and effective) platform to use is Google AdWords. Bing Ads and Yahoo Search Ads are also both SEM platforms that you can use. It’s important to note that—while all SEM platforms utilize a pay-per-click (PPC) advertising model—not all PPC is SEM. Facebook Ads and other social media ad platforms, for example, are pay-per-click platforms that do not fall under the SEM category. Instead of showing your ads to people who are searching for similar content like search ads do, social media sites introduce your product to people who happen to be just browsing through their feeds. These are two very, very different types of online advertising.