Building and running a successful small business requires a solid marketing strategy. In 2021, a well-performing website is a key ingredient in that strategy, and search engine marketing (SEM) is the secret to that performance. If you are not yet making use of SEM, you may be missing a trick. Here is what you need to know and how to get started.
What is SEM?
Remember the days when every business simply had to advertise in the Yellow Pages? In fact, some business owners chose their organization’s name because it started with the letter ‘A’ or even ‘AA’ to ensure a good place in the directory.
Today, this is what search engine marketing helps you achieve. Don’t worry – there’s no need to change the name of your business. SEM refers to the paid advertisements that appear at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs), above the results of so-called organic searches. You see them every time you search for a product or service on the likes of Google and Bing.
SEM is one of the most powerful marketing tools because it allows business owners to target customers at the precise moment when they are ready to buy. Other marketing channels also offer targeted approaches, but none of them can match the precision of search engine marketing.
The Difference Between SEM and SEO
SEM is different from search engine optimization (SEO). SEO refers to the organic rankings of businesses on results pages. To rank high, you improve and finetune the content of your website, ensuring that search engines find it when potential customers search for businesses like yours.
However, ranking organically can take time. This is why most small and medium businesses do best when they combine paid-for activities like SEM and organic search engine optimization. Paid-for search engine marketing has the power to create a competitive advantage for small businesses competing against large corporations.
If both are part of your organization’s digital marketing strategy, they work in parallel. SEM helps you rank high fast, whilst SEO supports the long-term success of your website and your business. Let’s take a closer look at search engine marketing.
How To Get Started
SEM is paid-for advertising and works by auctioning keywords among different potential advertisers.
Keywords
Keywords form the foundation of a successful search engine marketing strategy. To start developing that strategy, you need to put yourself into your customers’ position. Think about how they would be searching for businesses like yours.
The most relevant keywords to your customers are not always the ones that you think of first. Consider using keyword research tools to help you identify the most useful keywords for your business. You can see how many times people search for each of your target keywords and how much competition there is for that term.
In addition, you can identify search terms that need to be excluded from your campaigns. These so-called negative keywords refer to searches that are unlikely to convert to clicks to your website. For example, if you are selling women’s activewear, you may want to rank for ‘activewear’. However, someone searching for ‘men’s activewear’ is unlikely to buy from your company.
How many keywords you choose depends on your SEM budget. If your budget is small, consider focusing exclusively on keywords with the intent to purchase. With a bigger budget, you can also target potential customers who are not yet ready to buy and may currently only be looking for information.
Considering your competition is important, too. You need to look for keywords that prospective customers are actually searching for. However, extremely popular keywords may prove too expensive. In an ideal world, you want to identify keywords that are relevant and receive high search volume but attract relatively few competitors.
Google Ads Auctions
Once you have determined your keywords and set up an account with ad auctions such as Google Ads, it’s time to get ready for an ad auction.
Alongside specifying your chosen keywords, you also need to let search engines like Google know how much you are willing to pay for each click. Once Google sees that your relevant keywords are part of a search query, you are entered into an ad auction.
Whether your ad wins depends on your maximum bid but also on your quality score. As a Google Ads account holder, you can see your score in the ‘status’ column of the individual keywords. Google judges how relevant your advert is to the user, how likely they are to click on it, and how good their experience with your landing page will be.
Writing A Winning Ad
Successful SEM campaigns are based on a combination of your chosen keywords, advert copy, and your budget. High quality scores lead to better ad positions at lower costs. Google intends to deliver results matching the search query as closely as possible. If your content is highly relevant to user queries, it will score high for quality.
Each ad consists of three parts: a title, a display URL, and a description. Writing a convincing ad is based on understanding what potential customers are looking for and fulfilling those needs.
Reviewing and Finetuning
Like SEO, a successful SEM strategy requires regular review and finetuning. Your account allows you to see which of your adverts are performing well and how much you’re spending on each conversion.
Experimenting with your paid-for searches and updating keywords as well as advert copy regularly allows you to react to changes in your market and follow trends. At the same time, you don’t waste any of your marketing budget.
Whilst both SEO and SEM are invaluable for the successful growth of your business, SEM is a popular choice for small and medium businesses. It helps you achieve fast growth on a limited budget with a clear understanding of every single advert’s performance.
