In today’s increasingly competitive digital world, search engines have become an indispensable utility across industries and institutions, including digital marketing, healthcare, education, and eCommerce. Search engines are customer service tools that allow online users to locate diverse information on the internet, including news, blog posts, and brand offerings, and make informed decisions. Additionally, they serve as a powerful marketing platform for industry players to expand their online reach and increase brand awareness.
Search engine marketing, or SEM, is one of the most effective ways to grow your business in an increasingly competitive marketplace. With millions of companies out there all vying for the same eyeballs, it’s never been more important to advertise online, and search engine marketing is the most effective way to promote your products and grow your business.
In this guide, you’ll learn an overview of search engine marketing basics as well as some benefits for doing search engine marketing right.
Steps Involved In Search Engine Marketing
To outshine your competition, the basic steps involved in search engine marketing are as follows:
1. Keywords
Keywords are the foundation of search engine marketing. As users enter keywords (as part of search queries) into search engines to find what they’re looking for, it should come as little surprise that keywords form the basis of search engine marketing as an advertising strategy.
Before choosing which keywords to use in your search engine marketing campaigns, you need to conduct comprehensive research as part of your keyword management strategy.
First, you need to identify keywords relevant to your business and that prospective customers are likely to use when searching for your products and services. One way to accomplish this is by using WordStream’s Free Keyword Tool.
Enter a keyword that’s relevant to your business or service, and see related keyword suggestion ideas that can form the basis of various search engine marketing campaigns.
In addition to helping you find keywords you should be bidding on, thorough keyword research can also help you identify negative keywords – search terms that you should exclude from your campaigns. Negative keywords aren’t terms with negative connotations but rather irrelevant terms that are highly unlikely to result in conversions. For example, if you sell ice cream, you might want to exclude the keyword “ice cream recipes,” as users searching for ice cream recipes are unlikely to be in the market for your product.
This concept is known as search intent or the likelihood that a prospect will complete a purchase or other desired action after searching for a given term. Some keywords are considered to have high commercial intent or a strong indication that the searcher wants to buy something. Examples of high commercial intent keywords include:
- Buy
- Discount(s)
- Deal(s)
- Coupon(s)
- Free shipping
2. Ads Creation and Landing Page Development
Once you’ve identified your target keywords, the search engine marketing experts craft text-based ads to display in search results and link them to unique, optimized landing pages. The goal is to capture your target audience’s initial search intent and move them to the bottom of your sales funnel.
3. Account Setup and Tracking
This phase is crucial in understanding the effectiveness of your search engine marketing strategy. The SEM runs a lead-tracking report to see if the search engine in use supports conversion tracking. If it does, you must double-check the codes to ensure they are correctly installed on your landing pages.
4. Campaign Launch and Monitoring
Now that you have optimized paid search marketing ads, well-designed landing pages, and a robust search engine marketing strategy, you are almost ready to launch your PPC search engine marketing campaign. The SEM manages the campaign settings, such as locations, languages, networks, and devices, to determine how your ads run. Upon the campaign launch, we closely monitor your ad performance.
5. Evaluation and Analysis
Benchmarking campaign results against your paid search marketing goals is key to measuring your SEM success. You must track and evaluate the key performance indicators (KPIs), including click-through rate (CTR), Quality Score, search impression share, and cost per conversion. The analytics results allow us to optimize your subsequent paid search engine marketing campaigns for higher conversions.
Functions of Search Engine Marketing
Search engines have three significant functions:
1. Crawl: Search engines use their web crawlers or search engine spiders to scour billions of pages on the internet and find new and updated content, such as web pages, videos, PDF files, and images. Search engine spiders fetch a few websites and follow the links on these pages to find new URLs.
2. Index: In this phase, search engines store and organize the content based on the keywords, data, and user engagement. The new URLs found in the crawling process are indexed in a massive Caffeine database to be retrieved when the content on the URL matches an online user’s search query.
3. Rank: Search engines categorize web pages and rank them based on relevance to provide online users with the most relevant search results. The higher your website ranks on SERPs, the greater your search visibility and significance to the query.
Benefits of SEM
- Test And Measure Your Performance: Paid search ads allow you to test your ads’ performance and measure the results you’ve gathered for each campaign. Google Ads gives you access to in-depth data on the best performing ads in terms of impressions, clicks, Click-Through-Rate (CTR), top-performing keywords, etc. Depending on your campaign goals, you can evaluate your performance and identify what you ultimately need to optimize for better performance in the future.
- Pay Only Per Action: Once your paid search ads are created, your ads will appear for free, and you will only pay when someone takes action – meaning, clicks on your ad. Therefore, you can get free exposure and brand awareness on search engines and get charged only when somebody clicks on your ad hence visiting your landing page.
- Target The Right Audience Through Optimized Ads: SEM is an effective way for businesses to reach specific customers based on their search intentions. You can make your ads appear only to consumers searching using keywords closely related to your products or services. Choosing the right keywords for which your ads are triggered to appear helps you create highly optimized ads.
- Reach Your Clients Instantly: Search Engine Marketing is used to describe Google paid search ads. This technique is often used as a short-term strategy bringing fast visibility to your products or services. Compared to Search Engine Optimization – SEO paid search ads can give you quick results as they allow you to reach your target customers quasi instantly.
- Increase Brand Awareness: Google Search Ads allow advertisers to expose their brand name in the ad’s headlines, description, display URL, or extension links. Therefore, these paid search ads contribute to high brand awareness, especially that they often appear on top of Google search results.
Our SEO agency
Voix Digital, can help you map out a strategy. If you’re already running SEO advertising, we can help you perform an audit on it and spot opportunities for improvement. We can also point out loopholes in the campaign where you’re wasting ad spend and untapped opportunities worth pursuing. We’re here, when you’re ready, to help you grow your business with SEO advertising.
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