What Is Search Engine Marketing?
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Search Engine Marketing or SEM is an umbrella term that includes efforts and activities that are undertaken to improve the reach and visibility of a brand, product or service on the internet using various internet tools and strategies. The goal of search engine marketing is to attract targeted traffic to a given website to achieve certain business objectives and to increase the overall revenue through the business website or other online entity.
Certain experts limit the scope of search engine marketing to only to paid online advertising strategies but such a limited understanding of the term will make it a misnomer. For our purposes here, we use the term SEM to capture both paid and organic traffic generation efforts.
Is SEO Part Of SEM?
There is a certain amount of confusion prevailing with regard to the terms SEO or search engine optimization and SEM. Are these two the same or what is the relationship between these two terms? Search Engine Optimization aims at attracting traffic to websites and other Web properties through the use of organic traffic generation strategies such as making one’s website search engine friendly. SEM covers larger grounds than SEO, in other words, SEO is a subset of SEM.
How About Social Media Marketing?
The next question that is likely to crop up the relationship between social media marketing and search marketing. Social media marketing tries to increase the visibility and the reach of a brand specifically in the social media sites. Considering that social media platforms are essentially part of web properties, social media marketing could also be considered a subset of search engine marketing.
What Does Search Engine Marketing Actually Try To Do?
#1 Brand Review
The first step is to understand the brand’s current reach, familiarity and visibility. No internet marketing effort could aspire to achieve the desired results without first assessing a brand’s latest performance levels. Everything is decided based on one’s latest position. The initial assessment is therefore very crucial to all internet marketing efforts.
#2 Keywords Analysis
Though keyword analysis is often considered the first step of SEO efforts, here as well we need to know the keywords that will bring targeted traffic to your website or to your web property. Keywords analysis is highly effective when it uses manual analysis. You will need to know the search pattern and the latest set of keywords that people are using to look for your products or services.
#3 Identifying Right Platforms
For every niche market or niche industry, there will be certain preferred networks and web properties. Before you implement any strategies, you will need to identify platforms that are popular among your target audience. Identifying such platforms will help you focus your efforts better and help you enhance the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.
#4 Devising The Right Strategies
Today the search engine marketing industry is inundated with countless strategies. However, not all strategies are equally effective for all niche markets. You will therefore need to identify the right strategies for your business. When you are devising your strategies, it is important that you do not limit yourself to just one strategy or approach but make use of multiple strategies to reinforce your brand visibility online. Some of the search engine marketing strategies that are popular today include article marketing, social media marketing, video marketing, guest blogging, authority link building, PPC, infographic marketing and so on.
#5 Implementation Of The Strategies
Once you have brainstormed the right strategies that are suitable for the enhancement of your business, you will need to implement them and all the strategies have to be implemented in a search engine friendly way. Any brand that likes to take its name to the forefront should ensure consistent efforts. Sporadic efforts will not bring about the desired results. It is therefore important to put in regular efforts. It is not enough to have multiple strategies on paper but they will have to be implemented professionally to achieve the best results possible.
#6 Assessment Of The Results Obtained
An important aspect of all SEM efforts is the assessment of the efforts made. Without making this assessment, it is not possible to take things further. In the beginning, you would have made an initial assessment of where you stood and after spending a lot of time and money on search engine marketing, you need to know whether you have moved in the right direction and most importantly whether you have moved at all, from where you stood. The results will shed light on the effectiveness of the strategies that you have used. Based on the assessment, you will need to revisit your strategies.
#8 Regular SEM Maintenance
If you want to be successful online, you will need to regular efforts. SEM or search engine marketing is not a onetime endeavor whereby you could run a single campaign and forget about it. You will need to take ongoing efforts to sustain your visibility. Everyday new competition is entering the market adding on to the pressure. If your brand were to withstand the pressure, you will need to constantly be bolstering its presence with effective strategies.
Moreover, many new strategies will continue to emerge and you will need to be incorporating them too to your marketing mix.
Conclusion:
It is not possible for any brand to be successful today without carefully planned and executed search engine marketing efforts. It is certainly a huge responsibility on the shoulders of the business owners but something that they could not possibly avoid. There are no shortcuts here and if there are any then they are certainly not safe for any brand. You will therefore need to make sure that you make use of only the most trusted approaches to ranking and improving the visibility of your website. It is also not a bad idea to get help from professional service providers to ensure that you get proper guidance on how to go about promoting your brand in the top search engines in the most search engine friendly way that will elicit the best results.
