SEM

There are different niches when it comes to marketing on the web. SEM is one way of keeping track of them. SEM stands for search engine marketing.

SEM – Search Engine Marketing

The phrase “search engine marketing” seems rather vague and it truth it is. Better known as SEM, the phrase refers to all the different online marketing approaches that are used to get a site listed high in the rankings on a search engine such as Google. Let's take a look at a number of different ways this is accomplished.

SEM – Google

Open up a second tab and pull up Google. Now do a search for iPads. The page is going to be pretty busy. You will see Adwords ads along the top of the page and down the right column. The remaining chunk of the central page contains what are known as organic listings. There are text listings, the odd YouTube video and perhaps a shopping feed or twitter message. The results change every time you do a search, so it is hard to predict what exactly will appear. Regardless, all of these items are a form of search engine marketing. Thus, when we talk about SEM, we are talking about a number of different methodologies that all have to deal with these placements.

SEM – Paid

One niche of SEM is the paid placement version. In the case of Google, we are talking primarily about paying to list your ads on the search results through the Adwords system. This is often a good approach if you have a brand new site and no rankings, but it is an expensive long term option. The problem is you usually have to pay a lot for clicks and the profit margin can end up being razor thin. This is particularly troubling to your balance sheet because you will always be paying. You will pay today. You will pay next month and you will pay 10 years from now. Given this, most people prefer to look to organic listings as a long term strategy.

SEM – Organic

What is organic placement? It is search engine optimization. It is the act of getting pages on your site ranked in the search engines. The disadvantage of this is it takes time for rankings to happen. The huge advantage is once you get the rankings, all the traffic to your site is free. As you can imagine, free traffic does great things to your profit margins. If you consider our example above, being listed number one on Google for iPads would produce about 45 million visits a month or about 1.5 million a day. If you converted those visitors into sales at a rate of 1 in 100, you would be looking at about 15,000 sales a day with about $4 million in revenues. A day!

Most Clicks

Study after study shows that organic rankings are far more valuable than paid placements. Why? Well, people on the web have figured out that the listings on the top and right column of Google results are ads. How many people do you know that want to read ads? Not many and the same is true on the web. As much as 80 percent of the surfers will simply skip the paid placements and go down to the organic listings. This is why SEO is such a big deal.

SEM is a collection of different marketing techniques and strategies. Each has their place in the overall picture, but SEO is definitely the most important. Contact us today to learn more about the SEM and SEO options available for your site and budget.

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