What Is Search Engine Marketing?

Date First Published: 24th October 2022

Topic: Web Design & Development

Subtopic: SEO

Article Type: Computer Terms & Definitions

Difficulty: Medium

Difficulty Level: 5/10

CONTENTS

What Is An Ad Auction?
When To Focus On SEM?
Difference Between SEM and SEO
History

Learn more about what search engine marketing is in this article.

Search engine marketing (SEM) is a form of online marketing that involves promoting a website in the SERP using paid advertising. Sometimes, online businesses cannot advertise their products or services on the SERP without paying as they cannot rank high enough organically for people to see it, especially if the keywords are very competitive and there are lots of other businesses that sell the same products or services. That is where SEM is useful. The ads are often pay-per-click, meaning that businesses are only charged when someone clicks through their ad and visits their website. Examples of search engine marketing are the paid ads and shopping results that appear at the top before the organic results that are labelled as 'ad'.

Google paid search results

What Is An Ad Auction?

Each time businesses are ready to make an investment in SEM, they will need to enter an ad into an ad auction before it appears on the SERP. The business will need to identify the keywords they want to bid on and specify how much they are willing to spend per click on each of those keywords. When search engines, such as Google determine that the keywords they bid on are found within a searcher's query, they are entered into the ad auction.

Not every ad will appear on every search query related to that result and even if the keyword fits the bid quite well, that does not mean that it will win the bidding. Two main factors are considered by the ad auction to determine which ads to place on the SERP, which are their maximum bid and the quality score of their ad. The quality score is a score from 1-10 that estimates the quality of their ads, keywords, and landing pages. Businesses can find their quality score on their Google Ads account. Bidding too low will decrease the chances of their ads being shown and if no one is searching for the target keywords of the paid ad, businesses will not get any results from their ads. High-quality ads and high-quality bids win the best placement. Usually, the highest bidder's ads will appear right at the top.

When To Focus On SEM?

Businesses often focus on SEM when:

They do not have a limited budget. Larger businesses will likely want to focus on SEM to generate more traffic to their websites. It is unlikely that startup or small businesses with a limited marketing budget will focus on SEM. Instead, they may just focus on SEO.
They urgently need website traffic. It can take a long time to rank high enough in the organic search results for people to click, so businesses that urgently need website traffic and cannot wait may run PPC ads on the SERP to increase the chances of clicks. They can measure the success of their campaign by monitoring the click-through rate.
They are not that good at link building. If businesses are struggling to get backlinks to their website to rank higher in the organic search results, they may use SEM.

Difference Between SEM and SEO

The main difference between SEM and SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is that SEM is a paid strategy and focuses on practices that website owners use to rank higher in the SERP through paid advertising and SEO is an unpaid strategy that focuses on optimising a website to generate more traffic from the organic search results. Another difference between SEM and SEO is the time it takes to rank. SEO takes much longer than SEM, especially if the website is new and does not have many backlinks. Ranking on the first page of organic search results can take years, especially if the target keywords are very competitive. SEM is an instant and much quicker method of generating website traffic. The ads will appear straight away for visitors to see.

SEM does include some SEO practices, such as ensuring that the keywords and title are relevant to the content, but SEM includes pay-per-click ads in addition to SEO to drive more traffic to a website. That is known as paid traffic.

History

In the mid-to-late 1990s when the number of websites on the World Wide Web increased, search engines developed business models to help businesses and individuals generate website traffic, such as pay-per-click programs provided by Open Text in 1996 and then Goto.com in 1998. In 2001, Goto.com later changed its name to Overture and it was bought by Yahoo in 2003 and currently provides paid search models for advertisers through Yahoo Search Marketing. In 2000, Google started to provide ads on the search results page through the Google AdWords program.

The term 'search engine marketing' came around in 2001 and was made popular by Danny Sullivan to cover the different activities involved in managing paid listings at the search engines and developing online marketing strategies for businesses and individuals.