Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is a set of actions aimed at promoting one's website in search engine results with the goal of obtaining traffic and customers. SEM combines several directions of search engine promotion, the two main ones being SEO and PPC. Search engine marketing is actively used by many website owners because it is one of the most effective ways to promote a resource on the internet.
The goals of SEM are to:
- bring the site to the top of the search results for relevant queries;
- increase traffic;
- generate customers and sales;
- increase the company's visibility;
- improve the reputation of the site in the eyes of the search engine and its users.
Several types of promotion are used to achieve SEM goals at the same time. The first of these is SEO or search engine optimization. Within SEO promotion, specialists conduct a technical audit of the site, work on its structure, and fill it with relevant content. As a result, the site should meet the users' requests and be useful to them. As a result, the site's pages rank better in the search engine and attract more visitors from organic search. SEO is a conditionally free way of promotion. SEO promotion is built exclusively on free methods, and the site owner cannot simply pay the search engine to increase their positions. The site owner only spends money on specialists' services at first. And when the site is set up and regularly filled with the necessary content, the traffic comes for free.
The second part of SEM is PPC or Pay-Per-Click. This is the name for paid advertising that is placed on the search results page. The most common type of such promotion is contextual advertising. The site owner specifies the queries for which they want their ad to be displayed. The system evaluates the quality of the ad, as well as the bids that advertisers have made - how much money they are willing to pay for a display or click on the ad. Based on this information, the advertising platform decides which ad to show and when. Contextual advertising is very profitable because it is displayed before the organic search results and users see it first. Also, owners of online stores can launch product advertising on the search results page, such as Google Shopping. It works on a similar principle to contextual advertising, only instead of ads, mini product cards are shown.
SEM is very important for businesses that want to get as many customers as possible. For many companies, search results are one of the main channels for sales and traffic. To make SEM successful, it is important to take a comprehensive approach to promotion and use both paid and free methods.
