What Is SEM / Search Engine Marketing?

Search engine marketing is a form of paid advertisement that enables a website to be more visible on the web. Basically, the website owner pays for exposure on the web. The greater the exposure, the greater the advertiser (website owner) must pay.

There are many ways to be more visible on the web; the most obvious way is to show up in the search results page of search engines. And in particular, you want to show up in the search results page of Google, since more than 60% of the people use Google for web searches. The second placed search engine is Bing at over 30% market share. This includes searches done at Yahoo.com since Yahoo searches are now powered by the Bing as of August 2010. These statistics is for the United States. For the United Kingdom, Google has over 90% market share.

Although you can have search engine optimization done on your site so that it shows up more frequently and higher up in the "organic" natural search results, this can take time and it would not be considered "marketing". It would be considered “search engine optimization”, or SEO instead.

If you want instant results by spending marketing dollars, then what you would do is to pay the search engine to put an ad of your site in the “sponsored listing” section of the search results. This is known as Search Engine Marketing, or SEM.

If you want your ad to show up on Google's search results listing, you would want to enroll in the Google search engine marketing program known as AdWords.

If you want your ad to show up on Bing or Yahoo search results, you would want to enroll in Microsoft Advertising AdCenter.

Pay Per Click Advertisement

When we said that you pay Google or Microsoft to list your ad in their search results page, that is not entirely correct. Because they both use a “Pay Per Click” cost model. This is known as PPC for short. It means that you only pay when a visitor clicks on your ad which directs the visitor to your landing page on your site. If no one clicks on your ad even if it is displayed, then you do not pay.

However, you do want people to click on your ad in order to promote your product or service on your site. And when you set up your search engine marketing campaign correctly, people will definitely click on it.

Setting up a search engine marketing campaign may require a bit of learning and experimentation. The process will be different for Google than for Microsoft since they are using different systems.

Search engine marketing campaigns have now become quite complex due to the various options available. For example, you can even target your ad to a particular geographical location.

On Google's Adwords program, you can elect for your ad to show up on Google partner network sites in addition to Google's search results listing. Google partner network sites are other third party websites that have elected to show Google AdSense ads as a way for them to monetize their site. In addition, you can control your ad placement by adjusting your bid prices and other settings.

There are entire books devoted on how to set up search engine marketing for each of these campaigns. As a website owner, you may not have to time to learn how to set these campaigns up or the time to manage them. This is when hiring a search engine marketing professional to manage it for you might be useful.