Search Engine Marketing is one of the most effective ways to grow your business in an increasingly competitive marketplace. With millions of business 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.

SEM is the practice of marketing a business using paid advertisements that appear on search engine results page (SERP). Advertisers bid on keywords that users of services such as Google and Bing might enter when looking for certain products or services, which gives the advertiser the opportunity for their ads to appear alongside results for those search queries.

These advertisements, often known by the term pay-per-click ads, come in a variety of formats. Some are small, text-based advertisements, whereas others, such as product listing ads are more visual, product-based ads that allow consumer to see important information at a glance, such as price and reviews.

SEM greatest strength is that it offers advertisers the opportunity to put their advertisements in front of motivated customers who are ready to buy at the precise moment they are ready to make a purchase. No other advertising medium can do this, which is why SEM is so effective and such an amazing powerful way to grow your business.

SEM Keyword Research
Keywords are the foundation of SEM. As users enter keywords (as part of search queries) into search engines to find what they are looking for, SEM should come as little surprise that keywords form the basis of search engine marketing as an advertising strategy.

Before you can choose which keywords to use in your search engine marketing campaigns, you need to conduct comprehensive research as part of your keyword management strategy.

You need to identify keywords that are relevant to your business and that prospective customers are likely to use when searching for your products and services.

In addition to helping you find keywords you should be bidding on, through keyword research can also help you identify negative keywords - search terms that you should exclude from your campaigns. Negative keywords are not terms with negative connotations, but rather irrelevant terms that are highly unlikely to result in conversions.
For example, if you sell cakes, you might want to exclude the keyword "cake recipes", as users searching for ice cream recipes are unlikely to be in the market for your product.

Keywords and Account Structure
It is crucial aspect of keywords that is essential for the success of a search engine marketing campaign is account structure.

Logical keyword grouping and account structure can help you achieve higher click-through rates, lower cost-per-click, and generally stronger overall performance, and keyword research can help you think about how to best structure your account.

Structured account is comprised of five distinct elements:

  • Ad Campaigns
  • Ad Groups
  • Keywords
  • Ad Text
  • Landing Pages

Ad campaigns should be in many cases, focus on similar products or services.

Ad groups allow for each campaign to be further subcategorized for relevance. This level of organization might take slightly longer to set up initially, but the rewards namely higher CTRs at lower cost - make this effort worthwhile in the long run.

The SEM (Search Engine Marketing) Ad Auction
One of the most enduring misconceptions about SEM is that whomever has the largest advertising budget wins. Although a larger advertising budget can certainly be advantageous, especially when targeting highly competitive keywords, but it is far from a requirement for success with SEM. This is because all ads go through a process known as the ad auction before appearing alongside search results.

How the Ad Auction Works

The Ad Auction process takes place every single time someone enters a search query into Google. To be entered into the ad auction, advertisers identify keywords they want to bid on, and state how much they are willing to spend to have their ads appear alongside results relating to those keywords. If Google determines that the keywords you have bid on are contained within a user's search query, your ads are entered into the ad auction.

How Ads Win the Ad Auction
Not every single ad will appear on every single search. This is because the ad auction takes a variety of factors into account when determining the placement of ads on the SERP, and because not every keyword has sufficient commercial intent to justify displaying ads next to results. Two main factors that Google evalucates as part of the ad auction process are your maximum bid and the Quality Score of your ads.

Max bid is the maximum amount you have specified you are willing to pay for a click. Quality Score is a metric based on the overall quality of your advertisement. Google calculates these metrics during the ad auction to determine placement of advertisements. The result of this calculation is known as Ad Rank.

The Importance of Quality Score in SEM

Given that Google AdWords Quality Score comprises half of the ad rank formula, it is one of the most crucial metrics Search Engine Marketers can focus on. High Quality Scores can help you achieve better ad position at lower costs, because Google favors ads that are highly relevant to user queries.



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