SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING (SEM) AND SEARCH ENGINE ADVERTISING

Google Adwords and Alternative PPC methods

PAY-PER-CLICK CAMPAIGN

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Search Engine Advertising (SEA)

SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING

Keyword Search for SEM Strategy

This is the most important and at the same time most complicated task. In marketing for SMEs, a good selection of keywords can mean the success or failure of the digital strategy. You should use Google trends and the Google Adwords keyword planner to help you in finding ideas and checking the traffic volume of each keyword.

It is very important that we focus on words or phrases (long tail keywords) that have a low or average competition and a CPC (cost per click) acceptable in proportion to our investment.

In addition, there are numerous free and paid tools, which we will discuss in other articles, which can help you generate ideas.

SEM strategy

Once we have an extensive list of keywords for which we want to compete and our landing page is prepared, we will set our objectives and tracking KPI’s (Key performance indicators).

In the case of SEM, our main objective should be to generate conversions or leads (forms submitted with the data of a potential client).

To be able to follow the campaign well and optimize it correctly, we will set the following KPIs that we will analyze with Google Analytics and Adwords:

% Rebound (should not exceed 50-60%)
% Conversion (average is around 2% of visits)
ROI (return on investment or return of investment)
CPL / CPA (cost per lead / cost per share or conversion)

Is my SEM campaign profitable? How to calculate ROI

In the case of ROI, we must establish what would be worth a conversion or a lead for us to calculate if the current campaign produces a return or losses.

SEM optimization

Once we have our KPIs defined, we will begin our SEM campaign on Google Adwords.

The key to this point is to use each keyword for a few days to check its operation. We will use our KPIs to measure if the keyword is valid and try to optimize it to the maximum. When we consider that enough time has passed for analytical results to be reliable, we will discard keywords that are not working with a positive ROI and start using new keywords until we have at least one for each landing page.

Search Engine Advertising

Search Engine Advertising (SEA) or search advertising deal with selling advertising. Search engine optimization (SEO), on the other hand, aims to optimize the non-commercial, so-called ‘organic’ search results.

SEA measures aim to place advertisements on search results (keywords) in the search results.

These paid advertisements have a delimited area (column heading “ads”) on the results pages of Google, so they are out of competition with the organic search results. This advertising form is called Google Adwords, Microsoft’s Bing is Microsoft adCenter, and there are also other smaller PPC.

Yahoo Search Marketing, for a long time one of the established competitors in the industry, has now been withdrawn from the market and all customer campaigns have been migrated to Microsoft adCenter.

The main advantage of SEM campaigns compared to SEO is that they start immediately and also directly bring visitors and potential customers, in contrast to the always necessary lead time from several weeks to several months with SEO. The obvious disadvantage is also clear: at SEM you pay for traffic, most per click. And, unlike in the early days of the Adwords 2003 program, massive competition is now dominant in most of the commercial search terms, also in India, so the click rates are sometimes very high.

Therefore an Adwords campaign in order to be profitable must be well thought-out and reasonably structured, and a continuous split-testing and evaluation of the performance of the individual AdGroups must be carried out. This is a not negligible work that also requires some knowledge, so this should be best entrusted to the specialized agencies.

Behind us is the experience of many hundreds of successfully optimized Adwords campaigns and budgets of millions. We know the Adwords system down to the last detail, are certified Google Adwords Advertising Professionals, so you can get a lot of ROI and efficiency with almost every campaign.