Why Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is required?
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is a process of online marketing through search engines via multiple streams to increase search engine visibility, brand awareness and return of investments of your website. It seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages through the use of SEO.
The key to successful SEM for your business is developing a coherent strategy and execution plan encompassing organic and paid approaches. SEM should be a high priority for every business that wants tangible results from their website and Internet investment. One needs to do both Organic and Paid approaches to get the best results - Paid methods produce results fastest - within hours or days while Organic methods take months to produce results. Organic search is essential for high performance long-term sustainable results. There are many websites and articles on the Internet about how to do SEO.
Getting the basics done right is relatively straightforward - any reasonable website developer should know how to do it. Also,
getting outstanding long-term results with SEO requires more expertise. Although organic SEM seems to be free since there are no direct payments like PPC, doing SEO correctly does require paid expertise and resources. SEM is a major factor for achieving Internet Marketing success - it deserves the right attention and funding, but only within an overall, defined Internet Marketing strategy.
It is a marketing strategy that requires proper research, planning, management, execution and continuous refinement. For most smaller and medium sized enterprise, the workings of search engine optimization are much too slow for them to attain the results they need. There is too much in the way of trial and error, testing and then adjusting and testing again. It can take too long and precious time is wasted while adjustments are made.
With SEM the testing and ranking of pages can happen faster. Tests and results can be performed in the same day so one knows immediately if the campaign is working or needs adjusting. These adjustments can then be made and implemented without a significant loss of time. SEM is also beneficial in that it is paid advertising and that means the provider has an interest in making sure the advertising works for their customer. This means that rankings will always be at the top and paid searches will also have access to other affiliate sites as well.
The differences between SEO and SEM are: Firstly, SEM is concerning displaying advertisement while SEO is with designing and programming web page. Secondly, SEM requires planning while SEO requires technical or procedural application. Next, SEM deals directly with search engine administration & SEO does not deals. Lastly, A SEO optimization expert must have web designing, programming while A SEM expert need not require. It is important to note that SEM always conjuncts with SEO that is why it will suffice on its own.
Using SEM advertising options can also be beneficial in helping a business in dealing with their budget issues. On a daily basis, they can set their own budgets. This enables them to increase or decrease their spending as and when they see fit. For some they may wish to increase the budget to coincide with seasonal events or because they are generating more revenue. This makes using an SEM very cost effective and for a small to medium sized business this can be a very valuable asset.
In addition to benefits, the availability of reports that can show exactly how people are responding to the paid advertisements is also an advantage of SEM. It allows for more control over the campaign and how it is presented to prospective customers.