How to do SEM for Business

We could say that SEM or Search Engine Marketing and seo has 2 meanings: 

First of all, this term is used to refer exclusively to the strategies and campaigns. That carries out with the platforms for search engine ads, such as Google Ads, Bing Ads, etc. There are even those who could sum it up “like SEO but with payments”.

In the most general sense, search engine marketing and seo refers for marketing effort. Every website owner use for optimizing search engine visibility. , be it to increase traffic or authority.

In SEO what we do is optimize everything possible (content, pages, URLs). So that users find us when performing an “organic” search.

The SEM stands for quick campaigns that are created with PPC model (pay per click) by entering into an auction in Google Ads. Either to appear first in the search results or increase traffic to your site and or appear in user searches.

Advantages and disadvantages of SEM

Incorporating strategies for SEM positioning, taking advantage of the tools at your fingertips, has its cost but also its reward.

Advantages

The importance of SEM, and why it cannot be discarded from a strategy without premeditation. Is the secret lies in the advantages it can offer a company. Benefits like:

Immediate results: When an SEM campaign is established, optimized, and segmented. For the focus keywords and target you need, then you can obtain almost immediate results.

You define your investment from the beginning: From before starting your ad campaign. You can choose the amount of investment that will be allocated, and spent, within a certain period. Taking advantage it is possible to make small investments and even what you are willing to invest in each click.

Segmentation: From the moment you define the parameters of an ad campaign. You can make a very specific segmentation of the target to cover. By spending the budget only on the audience that interests you.

Possibility of conversions: By offering the visibility of your ads, you have a high probability of receiving leads. Directly your visitors will turn as your customers by the quality of what you are offering.

Constant monitoring: The various advertising platforms have modalities to be able to monitor in real-time results. That obtained from each campaign, this way you can see the entry of leads. How much impressions and clicks are costing, as well as make any changes to optimize results.

Disadvantages

It interrupts the user: One of the notable thing of digital marketing is the attraction strategies. Where the user of your website is naturally attracted with the content. However, banners or any other traditional type of advertising can be annoying for the user experience. It can even be affected if people use some software to block this kind of advertising.

High competition: This kind of strategy has grown in popularity so it is not surprising that large numbers of companies fight for the same opportunities to appear in the results of certain keywords. As a result, the bids become higher and the competition more expensive.

The investment defines the possible results: Investments in SEM are scalable, but just as they can be positive, they can be decisive in a field with high competition.

You need a constant investment: Just as an investment can define your exposure capacity, it also determines time. An SEM campaign stops producing results the moment you stop paying for it. Therefore, this strategy does not always pay off in the long run.

Why do we need the SEM?

What we want with SEM is to speed up the exposure and outreach process by investing in Pay Per Click (PPC) strategies or social media campaigns such as Facebook Ads. 

And it is this very thing, of having to pay, which keeps many from including SEM as part of their digital marketing and inbound marketing strategies. That and the word paid is used as an antonym for Internet marketing.

As we stated from the beginning, no marketing channel does not matter. No matter how “easy” or “free” it looks (like having strategies in social networks), we have to be aware that many of the digital platforms where we do internet marketing are designed to make this process easier for those who pay…

For example, Facebook is one of the tools that has become an elementary part of the strategies for marketers, if you are not on Facebook it is like not existing for an entire sector of the population.

Unfortunately, having many followers is not synonymous with guaranteed visibility. To illustrate, did you know that only 10 percent of your followers see your content? In other words, if you have 10,000 followers on Facebook, only 1,000 see your publications.

Also, of those thousand people, how likely is it that they will become your customers or leads? Sure, they follow your page and are most likely interested in your product, but what if they already bought with you and are not thinking of doing it shortly? What about the rest of the users who are interested in buying but are not located?

That is why SEM marketing and other payment strategies are important and relevant. They help us reach the right people almost immediately. And it is for this very reason that they should also be thought of as part of our inbound marketing efforts and not as just another extra.

How can we implement Search Engine Marketing and seo in our digital marketing strategies?

One of the clearest examples of SEM is Google AdWords since what we are looking for is to appear as the first option within the results pages. Imagine starting your party planning business and creating your blog website. Likely, there are already millions of similar businesses that have been making content or being present on the network for longer. The chances of you showing up as the first choice are very limited.

Although a content marketing and SEO strategy can provide great long-term benefits, this is a process that takes time and works to build.

This is where AdWords comes in, when paying for ads what you are doing is guaranteeing certain visibility to the person looking for the keywords with which you want to position yourself. To give an example, if your objective at the moment is to have weddings, when a person searches for weddings, your ad can be activated. However, this also has its trick, this is where all our SEO knowledge comes in.

We have already told you about the differences between SEO and SEM, we have told you how organic positioning is achieved, so you should already have an idea of ​​the type of optimization in differences we are talking about (and if not, this is your moment).

By placing an ad on Google AdWords we enter a kind of auction. Just as there are thousands of pages on the Internet fighting for the first place, so there are people interested in making their ads the most visible. 

Even companies like Amazon and Walmart use AdWords, especially when there are seasons of certain offers like Christmas or video game or console launches that attract a large number of people interested in looking for the same product. In this way, they can become the first site to be visited and get a conversion or sale.

For our ad to appear in the first place we need our bid or the offer we make to be the best possible. This is why our ads have to have the right keywords and be as attractive as possible.

 Google search capture for results with ads

With the SEM we can be able to appear on the organic results of a search, and thus have the opportunity to be the first thing because of the interested people.

Although the SEM gives us visibility in the short term and gives us that “push” that we need so that our content is seen, it cannot be seen as a substitute for making digital marketing strategies.

First, because as we already explained, the investment you make when implementing content strategies is much cheaper in the long term and it serves us better against the bots of Google search engines; in the long term, it is easier for us to position ourselves without the need to pay. 

The key when running a search engine marketing campaign is not to put aside SEM strategies and not use them properly, for example it’s good and effective when we want to generate more leads or are launching a campaign for a new product or service, and even for seasons like Black Friday or Cyber Monday.

Types of Search engine marketing

There are mainly three types of Search engine marketing, they are;

• Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
• Organic SEO
• Local SEO

What is Pay-Per-Click(PPC)?

The Search engine marketing and seo is both essential and a blanket term for any optimization activity. PPC or Pay per click is a digital advertising model in which the advertiser pays an amount (fixed or determined by auction) each time a user clicks on one of your ads to visit your website. The idea of ​​a pay-per-click campaign is to “buy visits” to a certain site, usually with the idea of ​​generating a certain action in users (registering or buying a product, for example).

Although PPC is a very common option, it is not the only possible payment model for online campaigns. Therefore, it should be distinguished from others such as:

PPM (pay per thousand): the advertiser pays a fixed amount for every thousand impressions, that is, every time the ad is shown a thousand times to users. Keep in mind that with this model we do not know how much we are going to pay for each visit, since those thousand impressions may generate many clicks, few or none.

PPA (pay per acquisition): the advertiser pays for each time the user performs a certain action, for example downloading an application. Therefore, the link between cost and objectives is even more evident than in the case of PPC.

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Some key concepts to understand PPC

CPC or cost per click:

The CPC is the price paid by the advertiser for each click on your ad.

 Here a fixed price can be agreed upon for each click or determined through an auction. In the second case, the advertiser establishes a bid or maximum price that he is willing to pay for each click. 

The system compares the ad with similar ones based on its quality and the price they are willing to pay and displays the winning ad first.

CTR

The CTR (” click-through rate “) is the percentage of users who click on an ad compared to the total number of users who have seen it. In general, the better an ad, the higher its CTR.

In some PPC systems, the CTR is a determining metric to establish the price of an ad, since the system “rewards” the ads that have higher quality and, therefore, higher CTR.

Print

We call each of the views an ad receives “impression”, whether the user clicks on it or not.

Segmentation

With internet advertising, we have a lot of control over the audience our ads are targeting. 

We can segment the audience that will see our PPC campaigns based on many factors: age, gender, location, interests, behaviors … Each pay-per-click platform offers different options that we can combine to achieve a high level of precision. Thus, we make sure that we only pay for clicks from users who have a good chance of becoming our customers.

Landing page

The sem landing page is the site that the user goes to after clicking on our ad. Whether you end up becoming a customer or leaving after a few seconds depends on it, so it must be well optimized.

The main characteristics of a good landing page are clarity, simplicity, and relevance to the ad.

Conversion

The conversion is probably the most important metric in a campaign PP C, measuring the performance of our ad in economic terms. We call each purchase made by a user after clicking on an ad a “conversion”. The conversion ratio is the percentage of users who convert concerning the number of users who click.

Conversion Ratio = Number of Conversions / Visits to the web

Frequency

The number of times each ad is shown to a specific user during a specified period. To calculate it, we have to divide the number of impressions by the number of unique users.

Frequency = Number of impressions / Number of unique users

Typically, a user receives several hits from the same campaign, and it may be a good idea to make sure that they have seen us. But we must avoid falling into excess since we can end up generating rejection and a feeling of spam and achieving an effect contrary to the desired one.

Advantages of PPC

• You only pay for the visits you receive. In other ad systems, the advertiser pays an amount to display the ad but is not guaranteed to deliver results. In contrast, with pay per click, there is a direct link between cost and visits.

• You have a lot of information about the performance of the ad.

• Pay-per-click platforms offer the advertiser complete information about what is happening with the ad, including the number of impressions, clicks, CTR, and conversions.

• Good optimization possibilities. With all this data, it is very easy to know if an ad is working or not and correct the course in real-time. The best strategy is to create multiple variants of each ad and compare them against each other to see which ones work best. In this way, we can ensure that our advertising has better and better results.

• Ads only reach the right audience. Thanks to the multiple targeting options, we don’t waste a single click, since only the users that interest us the most will see the ad. In turn, this improves ad results, as a user who is part of the target audience is more likely to click. And as we have seen, the higher the click-through rate, the lower the cost of the ad.

• You can control your budget precisely. PPC systems allow you to set a maximum budget per day, and in some, you can start with as little as one euro. This means that they can be adapted to advertisers of all sizes and that you can control in advance how much you are going to spend on each campaign.

• You can decide where and at what time your ad will be shown. Within the pay-per-click model, you can display your ads on many different platforms and locations (we’ll show you some examples in the next section) and select the ones that interest you the most. Some sites also allow you to choose the days and hours your ads will show.

• You will get more positioning and visibility. Thanks to PPC, you can show your ads on some of the most visited sites by users, such as search engines, social networks, or the most famous web portals.

What is local SEO?

 Local SEO is the process by which companies seek to optimize their online location visibility for search queries that contain local intent.

It is primarily used by businesses that have physical locations to reach consumers looking for goods and services in that area.

Local search results are affected by search queries that have a geographic component such as “clothing store open now” and “restaurants near me.” Even doing simple searches like “cafes” or “restaurants” on Google will return 3 immediate local business results in that area (known as the 3-store package).

Local SEO is also affected by factors like a location’s review rating and opening hours. If a user searches for “the best burgers near me”, “the best-rated hotels in Punta Cana” or “the best mechanic in my area”, a range of options will be displayed (depending on the rating) and the user will be able to filter the search for the score of those reviews.

Typical ranking factors for local SEO

Relevance signs are built around a specific business location based on several factors, such as listing the business in local directories, business listings, reviews, and accuracy of location information.

Local SEO can be achieved with…

1- Have a complete and accurate profile for each business location on Google My Business (GMB), Apple Maps, and other relevant search and map services

2- Create links to your website (the quantity and quality of the links is a factor)

3- Consistency and precision of the files and mention of the businesses on platforms such as Yelp, 4- Facebook, Yellowpages, Bing, and Apple Maps.

5- Manage reviews and provide customer feedback

Benefits of local SEO

1- Helps connect your business with “ready to buy” customers who are looking for products/services that your business provides in the location that you provide.

2- Increase pedestrian traffic to stores.

3- Local search queries are more likely to end in a purchase than organic search queries

4-Build local visibility online through your business file, mention in directories and links

5-Establish credibility through reviews

6- The local search results appear above the organic search results.

7- Cheaper and can be more effective than search pays

 Organic SEO 

Organic SEO is the process by which companies seek to improve their position on search engine results pages to drive targeted traffic to their website.

This is achieved by paying attention to the structure of the website and creating content that matches the user’s search intent.

Creating internal links between pages makes it easier for Google to crawl a website and group topics together. Receiving external links helps Google determine the level of authority and trust to place on a page.

Since trust and relevance are still important factors for the online user experience, internal and external links are still very important factors to consider when tackling your organic SEO.

Typical ranking factors for organic SEO

Methods like increasing keywords, building links, and writing high-quality content can improve a site’s search engine ranking.

Organic SEO can be achieved by …

1- Identify who the target customer is

2- Identify what they are looking for / what problems they are trying to solve

3- Match customer issues with common keyword search queries and create highly relevant content that addresses customer concerns

4- Optimization of web pages with relevant content aimed at search intention

5- Building links (both internal and external)

6- Incorporation of meta tags (used to specify how the content should be displayed in search engines)

Benefits of Organic SEO

1- Generate more targeted traffic to your website.

2- Classification for inquiries that generate perspectives of “good fit” for the business

3- Users are more open to your “tone” because they found you

4- Establish your business as a thought leader in the industry.

5- Cheaper and often more effective than paid search (i.e. Google AdWords)

Keyword Research in Search Engine Marketing and seo

The keywords or keywords are extremely important, both for SEM, SEO, and Social Media. They are the terms that users enter in search engines to find information. 

 In this post, we will focus on various aspects of this analysis: what are the objectives, some key concepts in keyword research, and what tools we can use.

Let’s not forget that keywords are the set of characters with which the user performs a search. If we enter “boots” or “high boots” when searching, these are two different keywords or two different keywords.

Content is closely related to keywords. It is important to consider when writing content if someone will search for the information, how they could search for it, what is the best title for SEO, and if the content contributes something to the SEO strategy that we want to follow.

Good keywords related to our content imply an effective presence in search engines.