What is SEM in Marketing? Best SEM Strategies & Practices in 2024

Digital marketing continues to evolve year after year, giving modern marketers a vast array of channels, tricks, and tools that can help them reach larger audiences.

One area that has become integral to many companies is search engine marketing (SEM), where businesses focus their efforts on marketing in search engines like Google and Bing.

In this article, we’ll dive into SEM, and present you with a host of SEM strategies that you can use to grow your business.

What is SEM in Marketing?

SEM, or Search Engine Marketing, is a digital marketing technique that aims to increase brand visibility in search engines, through pay-per-click advertising or by attracting organic traffic through search engine optimization (SEO) and content marketing.

Paid advertising enables you to buy advertising space in the search engine results pages (SERPs), which promises faster results than the long haul of SEO.

What is the Difference Between SEM and SEO?

SEO is the process of optimizing your website content and pages to generate more traffic from search engines. SEM goes beyond this to incorporate paid search ads.

Both SEO and SEM should be part of your digital marketing strategy, as they both have their merits. SEO helps establish your online reputation in the long-term, so you will attract traffic continuously with evergreen content that connects with people at the top-of-the-funnel.

SEM enables you to get quick results cost-effectively by driving conversions at the bottom-of-the-funnel.

Benefits of Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

SEM is a viable marketing strategy that offers your business great flexibility. Here are some of the best benefits of SEM:

• It increases brand awareness and the brand equity of your products and services.
• It increases brand visibility (and website traffic).
• You can advertise to an audience that’s already interested in you.
• You can increase targeted leads.
• You can target your ads to users based on languages and locations.
• It gives you a competitive advantage.
• It generates a higher ROI compared to other advertising media.

How SEM Works

Here is the basic process of SEM:

1. You, as the advertiser, will select keywords to target with your ads. These keywords should be relevant to your audience and your products or services.
2. Next, you state the maximum cost per click (Max. CPC) that you are willing to pay for a single user click on your ad.
3. Whenever a consumer search triggers any of the associated keywords or phrases on your keywords list, the corresponding ad will get shown in SERPs. Paid ads are ranked dependent on quality score , who bids the most and few other factors.
4. If a user clicks on your ad, you will be charged for that click.

11 Steps to Succeed in SEM

SEM may be faster than SEO, but it is not guaranteed to deliver results overnight. It won’t deliver results at all if you don’t have the right approach.

Here are some steps to ensure you move the needle in the right direction:

1. Get Clear with your Objective

You can use paid ads for several reasons, such as brand awareness or lead generation. Before diving in, you must be clear about your goals and how much you are willing to pay to get there. Think about what success looks like, and how you will measure it.

2. Define an Effective Strategy

Know your audience and understand their needs and interests. When you do that, you’ll have more chances of making SEM work, as you’ll be able to attract them with marketing that means something to them.

3. Keyword Development

Without a solid keywords list, your SEM strategies are doomed. Once again, you must keep your audience interests in mind, as well as your own business. Great keywords are found in the common areas between these two.

Think about how your prospects search and the terms they might use. With keyword research tools, you can discover valuable terms that can drive traffic to your website. Regardless of your budget or goal, look for keywords that have:

• Higher conversion rates.
• Higher click through rate (CTR) as it indicates greater ad relevance.
• A strong correlation between CTR and conversion rates.

When developing your keyword library, it helps to break it down into several subgroups:

1. A branded keyword list includes terms like your company name, slogan, and anything closely related to your products or services. Branded keywords will become your most productive target terms, and you should make sure you claim these — even ahead of any affiliate partners.
2. Product or service keyword list includes terms that are variations of your products and services. This relatively tight list should be consistent with your existing site navigational structure.
3. General keyword list consists of generic terms that people use to find your products or services. Typically, these terms have the lowest conversion rate, but they still hold value. For example, anyone selling DVDs should bid on the keyword, DVD, just to spread brand awareness when people are in the early stages of the customer journey.
4. Affinity keywords are terms that have a loose correlation to your business. For example, someone selling power tools may think about bidding on keywords to do with home improvement.
5. Long-tail keyword list includes longer terms that are usually more specific, comprising 3-5 word phrases. For example, shoes is a broad keyword, whereas men’s blue suede shoes is a long-tail keyword.
6. Negative keyword list contains terms that you don’t want to trigger your ad. These terms attract irrelevant traffic, so it’s best to use them as filters to stop your budget from going to waste on irrelevant clicks. By refining your negative keywords list over time, you can improve the quality of your traffic, resulting in more leads and conversions.

4. Landing Page Development

Your landing pages must be optimized, as they are a critical step that can either convince people to convert or send them running for the exit. When you’re working on your SEM campaigns, here are a few tips to improve your landing pages:

• Conduct a thorough analysis to determine if your pages need reworking to be compatible with your SEM listings. If your site is not SEM friendly, fix it to offer a smooth and enjoyable user experience.
• Test all links so that each listing is pointed to the correct page.
• Ensure that the website has tracking capabilities so that you can track all user
• Make conversions easy with just one or two strong, clear calls-to-action and an easy-to-navigate interface.

Ensure your content is of high-quality. It should be relevant to your audience, and the information should be current, concise, and actionable. You won’t find weak, thin content on the first page of Google, so up your game with your landing page content to climb the rankings.

5. Ad Copy Development

Your ad copy must be targeted, leveraging keywords that speak to the needs of your prospects. Think about the following questions when creating your ad copy:

• Is your copy accurate and not misleading?
• Is your copy written to attract only the most-qualified clicks, rather than broad copy designed to attract a lot of clicks, many of which won’t convert?
• Does your copy include any of the words that search engines typically don’t allow, such as best, number one, and other superlatives?

You may not have a lot of space in paid ads, but you can use it wisely. Think carefully about how to craft compelling ad copy that catches the attention of users, and entices them to click to learn more.

6. Launch SEM Campaign

When you’re ready to upload your listings to Google, do the following:

• Establish categories of keywords for all search engines.
• Test the URLs for each keyword to ensure they point to the correct landing pages.
• Review your copy to ensure that there are no errors and that each copy corresponds to its respective search listing.

When you’re sure that everything is on-point, you can launch your campaign. Now, get ready to watch the key metrics and prepare to analyze the results.

7. Post-launch optimization of SEM campaigns

A proactive, disciplined attitude to testing and monitoring is at the heart of any successful SEM campaign. You must always be testing something, and you should seek to continually enhance your campaigns with minor tweaks that improve the performance of your SEM strategies.

After launching, keep a close watch on your keywords to see which terms deliver the results you desire. Over time, you can identify winners and losers, and then you can adjust your bids accordingly.

The more active a keyword is, the more vigilant you should be with your analysis. For example, you should pay more attention to a keyword driving 100 clicks a day compared to one generating 100 clicks a month.

Based on results, determine what bid changes you need to make. Track your conversions over time to see where you are losing potential conversions. Somewhere in your funnel, people are dropping out. If you can pinpoint the areas of abandonment, you can address the problem to improve your fortunes.

8. Measure together

View your data holistically, evaluating each digital touch point in relation to the big picture. You can measure the ROI of every tactic, and assess it in comparison to the average ROI on other campaigns across the Google network.

9. Optimize the right metric

Keep your goals in mind when you want to optimize your campaign. By understanding the relation of key metrics to your business objectives, you can make changes to the right areas.

10. Optimize longer term

Short-term wins are good, but your business needs long-term plans and sustained growth if it is going to survive. Your SEM strategies should focus on critical success areas, like customer retention and brand loyalty, so that you can nurture strong, durable relationships with a dedicated customer base that will support your brand for years to come.

11. Acquire the best customers

When you want to find customers that will stick around to become loyal brand advocates, it may take somewhat of a reset in your normal principles and practices of business. Instead of working hard on bidding strategies, you should endeavor to get more personal and look to acquire model customers that suit your brand.

11 Common SEM Mistakes to Avoid

SEM isn’t easy to master. Here are some common pitfalls that you should keep in mind:

1. Irrelevant Ads – If your ads don’t match their landing pages, you will frustrate your prospects, and lose their trust.
2. Un Compelling ad copy – There’s already too much content online. If your copy is dull or boring, it will get nowhere.
3. Ignoring keyword match types – Match types give you control over your budget and help you find a balance between audience reach and keyword relevance.
4. Forgetting to optimize for mobile – Don’t make this mistake in 2024! This is the mobile age, so you can’t ignore it any longer.
5. Forgetting about user intent – We live in customer-centric times, so user intent is crucial.
6. Poor website navigation – A poor experience will increase your bounce rate.
7. Failing to measure effectively – Don’t waste your data by forgetting to measure the impact of any changes.
8. Not calling your customers to action – sometimes, a little CTA makes all the difference.
9. Failing to use ad extensions – Why waste opportunities to give your prospects more vital information?
10. Avoiding remarketing – You may think it’s spammy, but remarketing makes a lot of sense, and it delivers results!
11. Ignoring Your Competitors – you can learn from them!

Wrap Up

SEM strategies are now a major part of modern marketing. While social media, email, and direct mail still have their place, it makes sense to invest in search engine marketing because of the immense potential for new leads and profits.

Take your time to devise a solid SEM strategy that caters to the specific needs of your audience and optimize it over time to grow your business.