There are many ways to drive traffic to your website, ranging from free methods, like social media, to very expensive approaches, like buying banner advertising. Somewhere in the middle is Search Engine Marketing (SEM). While this method is never free, you can decide how much you’ll spend, and that number can literally go as high as you’d like. If your marketing budget isn’t unlimited (is anyone’s?), can SEM be an effective way to get traffic to your site? The answer is almost certainly, yes – if it’s done right.
What exactly is SEM?
Search Engine Marketing is buying search terms and keywords from a search engine. This means that when someone searches for these terms, they see your ad. Obviously there’s more to it than that, but that’s basically the general idea.
What Makes SEM Effective?
Whatever form of marketing you use, you goal is obviously to get your target market (those who most want your products and services) to see that marketing. The more laser-focused your marketing is, the less your per-customer acquisition costs are, because you’re not wasting marketing dollars getting your name in front of people who don’t care.
SEM, more so than just about any other marketing vehicle, allows you to advertise to a potential customer in a highly-targeted manner. When you think about it, when done right, SEM is effectively showing your ads only to people who just told you that your product is what they’re looking for. It doesn’t get much more targeted than that!
How should you go about starting an SEM campaign?
As with any other marketing or general business initiative, your first step is planning. You don’t have to put together an elaborate marketing plan, but there are some things you need to decide. First, figure out which search terms and keywords you want to target. This should be easy in the beginning, as you’ll simply pick the terms that most relate to your business. As you get further into the process, you’ll evaluate other possible terms, using tools like Google’s keyword tool. Next, you want to set a budget for your campaign. This of course is an individual decision that only you can determine. Suffice to say that in general the more you spend, the faster you can expect results. Once you’ve decided on your keywords and budget, you’ll want to figure out exactly what will display when people see your ad. There are volumes of information online about how to write compelling SEM copy, and it’s a great idea to review some of it. Don’t try to reinvent the wheel on this one. Last, but certainly not least, you’ll need to decide which page on your site people will land on when clicking on your ad. While at first it might seem like your homepage makes sense, there are a lot of reasons to customize your landing pages based on specific SEM purchases. Again, there is a lot written about landing pages, and you should research this thoroughly.
Ready, Set, Go!
There are three primary search engines, and most agree that your efforts are best spent with them than with any of the smaller sites. Here are the three, with links to their SEM programs:
Google: AdWords
Yahoo: Yahoo Advertising
Bing: Microsoft adCenter
Each of the above programs offers solutions for the smallest of budgets, and each provides a wide range of tools and training to help you realize success in your SEM efforts. This post is just an introduction to SEM. If you’re considering your own SEM campaign, be sure to research your options and educate yourself on the ins and outs of this advertising medium. And if you have experience to share, please don’t hesitate to do so in the comments!
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SEM is definitely a tough business, if you don’t know what you are doing you can waste a lot of money on it. I know because I wasted $300 in my first month with 0 conversions!
Thanks for the intro to SEM. I guess this is where PPC also comes into play right?
I’m thinking of looking into doing SEM with Google, probably in the near future to gets some extra traffic to my site. Thanks for providing valuable information. This helps me out a lot!!
Hi guys,
I heard of google adwords. But I’m not familiar with the other two. I will most definitely do my research before using either one of them.
Kind regards,
Sam
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I am reading now alot of traffic bringing sources because i want to bring traffic to one of my sites and it will be my first time so i am trying my best to do it in the right way
Whats great about this is the fact that its easy for a lot of beginners. This might be common sense to a lot of people but when it comes down to it – Not everyone knows the benefits that are discussed in your post. Great work! Looking forward to seeing more of your work…
Thanks, I don’t have much info on SEM so every info I can read up about it is helpful. At first, I just hope to not lose any money.
Till then,
Jean
Hey, I think that search engine marketing is an important thing to do these days. Other wise, you may not get found. SEO is important too, though right?
Wow amazing article. Putting snapshots is an amazing thing as everything becomes really understandable. From my experience I would say that for me only doing SEM on Google helped. The traffic coming from bing and yahoo is not too much and i am pretty much focused on google.
This is a great introduction to SEM. I actually attempted it a few years ago, with poor success. I think my biggest mistake was not writing ads that caught one’s attention.
Remember I read somewhere Shakespeare’s Cassius said, “the fault, dear Brutus lies not in the stars, but in ourselves.” The problem is NOT the customer; it’s what you’re saying, how you’re saying it, and the expectations you’ve set for determining your site’s performance.
Please Let Me know in Details about it..
Nice post on SEM. I would probably throw in some other good keyword tools such as spyfu or keywordspy as additional tools. I know those are paid ones but they are worth their weight in gold.
This is really nice post about SEO. Thanks for sharing..
While SEM is an important aspect to generating brand awareness, buzz and so forth, it does cost money and usually we like to spend less when we can.
However, by utilizing proper SEO techniques, you can do the same thing, but for free. Look at embedding keywords into your html, cross-linking to related(credible) sites and ensure that you frequently update your site as search engines recognize this and will rank you higher when key terms are searched, hence you will generate more traffic.
Don’t waste your money, http://www.google.com/analytics/ is free and it also helps.
Yes i think the very basic thing is the analysis part. The selection of keywords that are target-able and can really drive traffic to your website. If you have properly selected your keywords then you can use the various methods to rank higher for those terms.
Becoming a power digger and writing quality content in reference to your products is the best approach and if you want to use advertising I suggest you use Buy and Sell ads. Reasonable and effective.
While it is quite easy to setup a SEM campaign, it is not so easy to setup an effective SEM campaign. If you don’t know what you’re doing it is easy to make simple mistakes such as bidding on keywords that are too broad. For example, if you were doing SEM for a NY car dealership, it would be more much more worthwhile to bid on ‘new york cars’ instead of just ‘cars’. So instead of trying to setup a SEM campaign yourself, recruit some experts until you are more comfortable.
The positive things of doing SEM for the search terms you selected is that for same keyword the organic position has been also increasing one side. I have seen this for some of the keywords i selected.