Search Engine Marketing : What is a Search Engine? How does Search Engine Marketing work?

Search Engines are answer machines. They exist to discover, understand and organize the internet’s content to offer relevant results to the questions searchers are asking.

In case you are still wondering what Search engine marketing is, it refers to paid search marketing. The practice of marketing a business using paid advertisements that appear on the search engine. SEM is one of the most effective ways to grow your business in a competitive marketplace.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) used to be the general term that bounds search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimization (SEO). However, SEO grew over time and is now a completely separate marketing field. Some people today still say SEO is a part of SEM.

One of SEM’s greatest strengths is that it offers advertisers the opportunity to put their Ads in front of motivated customers who are ready to buy at the precise moment they are ready to purchase. The advertisers are required to use major keywords that users might enter when looking for a certain service or product on the search engines.

The ads are commonly known as the pay-per-click ads and they could come in a whole ton of formats. They could be small, text-based, or visual with products listed alongside important information, prices, and reviews.

Search Engine Marketing gets results much faster. If you pay for Ads on, results are seen immediately on search engines when searched. With search engine marketing, businesses pay for their adverts to appear alongside search questions in search engines. SEM majorly focuses on promoting various websites in the search engine results pages, Google, Yahoo, Safari, and Bing are examples of search engines.

SEM is also alternately referred to as paid search or pay per click (PPC). Pay-per-click advertising or paid search is a vital part of SEM, it’s simply referred to paid search marketing, typically through search engines like google, bing, etc.

Paid search ads can be found on almost any search results page. These paid placements are typically located at the top or bottom of the page. They include an “Ad” designation to let users know that it is paid placement. The PPCs could also appear in the form of banner ads, social media such as on YouTube and Facebook.

PPC advertising is called that because the most common form involves paying a certain fixed amount for every time someone clicks on your Ad and goes into your website as a result. These ads are usually called “sponsored links”. There you pay a certain amount every time your ad is displayed, whether someone clicks it or not.

The biggest benefit of paid search is your company’s appearance at the top of the search engine results page. If you have enough investment, PPC is the fastest way to get to the top. If you know your way around the platform, you can set up a PPC campaign in less than an hour and appear immediately in the sponsored results.

Search engines reward advertisers who can create relevant, intelligently targeted pay-per-click campaigns by charging them less for ad clicks. If your ads and landing pages are useful and satisfying to users, Google charges you less per click, leading to higher profits for your business.

This paid search advertising works in such a way that the sponsored ads appear either at the top or beside the very first search engine results. This helps to give the advertised websites more visibility as well as prominence over other websites. The advertiser gets to:

• Choose a list of specific keywords that are related to the product or website they want to advertise.
• Choose a geographic location where they would like the ad to be advertised.
• Create a relevant text-based ad that will be displayed on the search engine results page.
• Make a bid on the price the amount they will be willing to pay for every click on their ad.

Unlike any other type of ad, it’s always easier for the advertisers to make text-based ads so they can always make so more with ease. All they have to do is enter an Ad headline followed by a text in the body as well as a call to action not forgetting the inclusive URL.

Here are some of the few benefits of SEM:

• Instant Results: Not many people will understand why you need to pay a certain amount of money to show up on the search engines and have people visit your website. You can improve your online visibility with SEM. When you pay for clicks you will see instant results, your website or page will appear on the first page of the search engine results hence more exposure to potential consumers. In short, you will be easily found.
• Better Ranking: Today there is a lot of competition on the internet and it is never an easy thing getting to the top positions. If what you got there is a new business that’s trying to find a position, marketing through the search engine might be a way to go. This is because the PPC advertising will get your business on the front pages of the search engine hence exposing your business to your target customers.
• Exposure to Local Search: PPC ads are not just for a business that is trying to get to the national and international scale. The exposure from the marketing done through the search engine helps the small local businesses to get local reach too. This way you can get the local customers near you to find your business more easily.
• Analytics and Tracking: You get to collect data when someone actually reaches out to your website. You can do this through Bing, Yahoo, and Google among others. You get to know where the person is located, the time they spent on your website, the pages they visited on the website as well as the type of device they used to access your website. This offers you real-time tracking which is a huge benefit that anyone can realize from PPC ads.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is aimed at boosting your website’s or web page appearances in search engines. However, unlike SEM, the SEO marketer does not pay for it. Search engine optimization is the process that organizations go through to help make sure that their site ranks high in the search engines for relevant use of keywords and phrases.

SEO is important because it is how people find your site in search engines. Search Engine Optimization involves making certain changes to your website design and content that make your site more attractive to a search engine. You do this in hopes that the search engine will display your website as a top result on the search engine results page. For instance, let’s say that you have an article about how to “increase Instagram Followers “. To get your content in front of the right people, you want to try to enhance your blog post with relevant keywords relating to the topic so that it will show up as a top result for anyone who searches for the phrase “how to increase Instagram followers”

Tips you may follow, for your website pages to have a better chance of receiving more Google love than they would otherwise:

• Remove Anything that Slows Down Your Site: Page speed is a critical factor in SEO. A slow page frustrates users and ultimately discourages people from buying your product. In the mind of potential buyers, a slow site is an untrustworthy site. Period. Page speed is vital to search engines, people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load.”
• Include one primary keyword in a page URL: The web pages in your domain may be optimized for many different keywords. It is said that the best way is to focus only on one keyword phrase and to include it directly in the URL address. Use hyphens (-) instead of underscores (_) in URLs.
• Optimize all images with proper keywords: Images are often overlooked. Don’t forget to use keyword phrases not only throughout the website’s content but also in the image description. It is also believed that it’s good practice to use words such as: “image”, “photo”, “picture” along with your picked keyword.
• Use meta-description to present your brand better: A meta description is a short paragraph that is displayed under a title tag

A meta-description allows you to introduce your brand before a searcher pays a visit to your site and actually sees the products that you offer.

• Find keywords that will work for you: SEO is pretty much based on keywords. The key to a good SEO strategy is to find out what words users type into a search bar when they look for websites like yours. With a list of relevant keywords in your hand, you’ll be halfway there. Your job is to pick the most relevant keyword phrases from the list. However, it is also important that those keywords are popular among users.
• Pay special attention to the spelling and grammar of your content: High-quality content means faultless spelling. Indeed, people often misspell words they type into search bars. Excessive misspellings and poor grammar can only harm your website’s rankings.

Well, both SEO and SEM have benefits. The question is what your website has to offer, and whether you’re using SEO and SEM the right way for your business.

There are a lot of benefits to SEO. The most obvious is brand awareness. When your customers search for your relevant keywords, SEO is what puts you right in front of them. If you show up high in search results when a customer does a search query, the customer is more likely to view you as a market authority. The biggest drawback of SEO is that you’re rewarded for being an authority, and the more people who click means the higher you’ll rank. This is a great thing until you recall that it can take months to build this kind of authoritative base

SEM is paid for and you can see exactly what that money is getting you in terms of traffic, it’s much easier to measure your ROI (Return on Investment) for SEM. Think of how many times you scrolled right past the ads in the search results. Exactly, so many times.

You can make the two work together. The goal is to avoid leaning too heavily on one strategy or the other. Balance your immediate SEM results with your SEO strategy. That way, you’re building yourself up as a market authority at the same time you’re creating an active customer base.

Optimizing your site is a continuous process that takes time, commitment, a lot of patience and Trace got you covered. our expertise is unparalleled in the tech industry, we help businesses get more prominent positioning on search engine result pages. For more assistance and further inquiries, send mail to support@tracemedialtd.com and visit tracemedialtd.com You can call/WhatsApp 07034586840 or leave comments and feedback in the comment box below.