Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

In the business world with its increasing population and competitiveness which sees everyone trying to outdo each other, search engine marketing is one of the few and fast ways to grow a business. Innumerable businesses brawling daily to hold the center stage and hold the number one spot, it is only normal that the internet becomes a place where these various businesses attempt to court attention by advertising and a handy tool for publicizing and promoting your business while nurturing it to get to its full potential.

Success in business depends vitally on people knowing what you are offering as services or the goods you are selling and you have a better chance of creating this awareness through the mastery of search Engine Marketing or SEM. Basically, Search Engine Marketing is just advertising your business on the internet such that it appears on the result pages of search engines. It is like manipulating the internet to suggest to users to visit your business address. 

Experts on this advertising strategy bank on the probability of users typing in keywords that are unique to the services you are offering or the goods that you are selling on search engines such as yahoo, Bing and google which will present their internet search result based on most used keywords and this aids what you are advertising to appear with the results when these search engines conclude their internet search.

Where and how do i start ?

Without mastering Search engine marketing, you might get very confused and frustrated which would affect generally you outlook continuous use of search engine marketing. Most companies stay away from it because they do not have an expert to handle it. It is a very technical form of advertising and needs to be studied and taken seriously for it to be effective and useful to you and your business. When mastered and properly used, search engine marketing can be a very good tool to improve your business.

You should consider the following tips :

• It is important to know your target audience and the platform they might likely make use of. The determinants of this could include age, demographic location, gender and other things like that. When you know the type of people you want to attract, it helps you decide how to reach them. The determinants like age affects the type of products or services particular people would want to procure, the mannerism in their researches, how they like to communicate. It will shape your choice of search engines and also keyword choice.
• It is also very advisable to start search engine marketing on a small scale and a slow pace too. This is because you want to be able to monitor your progress or figure out a problem where there is any. You may become overwhelmed if you run a lot of search engine marketing adverts at once.

How much should i start bidding ?

Bidding is important in search engine marketing. It is the particular price an advertiser is offering in a search engine marketing auction so that their adverts can appear at the top of most arch results of search engines, for example Google. The whole point is to acquire or secure an advertising space by offering a particular price for certain keywords that might relate to their business.

If your bids of the particular prices you are offering is too low then you run the risk of your adverts never showing in the search engine results and if it is too high then you may lose all your money while achieving nothing. So you must make your bidding decisions based on some factors such as conversion rate of your business advert with the right data you should be able to make estimates, you may also want to just drive any form of traffic and clicks to your adverts so that you can figure what is doing the magic and then bid on it although this can be a long time process as you will have to acquire data first before thinking of profit.

What is a broad match ?

Broad match is a keyword matching option that lets your adverts appear not only when your keyword is searched but also when something relatively close to it or a variation of the keyword is searched.  An instance would be adding the “pen” as a keyword but when a keyword like “writing material” is searched, your keyword appears to. Broad match is effective because it reaches out to more people.

What is an exact match ?

This is a close opposite of the broad match. It is a keyword matching option that brings up your advert when a specific keyword has been entered or a really very close variant. Apparently you will not get as much impressions as the broad match type but you have a control on you advertising budget.

What is relevancy score ?

This is the score of an advert on a scale of 1-10 that tells how well an advert has been received by your target market or audience. It is a social media rating where 10 is the highest relevance score and 1 is the lowest. A good relevance score is an important tool in discerning how successful an advert has been.