Search Engine Marketing

When it comes to Search Engine Marketing, sometimes, even if you have the skills, you don’t feel like putting in all the work and effort and would rather pay someone else to handle the job for you. It’s the reason restaurants and fast food exist—and even thrive.  Like a fine wine, the grapes of your individual marketing actions need to combine together and have time to age properly. But what about when you really want that drink right now? For marketing, that’s where Search Engine Marketing (SEM) comes in.

When you have a new business or are building a brand-new website, you usually don’t see the results right away. Google takes time–sometimes several months–to crawl through your site and decide that you’re worthy of being displayed alongside the superabundance of sites that already exist. So what can you do in the meantime? Search Engine Marketing, is a great way to do effective marketing with fast results while you wait for your other marketing efforts to mature and can amplify an established, well-performing site by making it even more robust.

More than SEM-antics

SEM is a way of advertising on search engines like Google using platforms such as Google Ads. SEM can work in tandem with SEO—Search Engine Optimisation—but also on its own. The goal of both is to get you found, but the approach is very different.

The main difference between the two is that SEM is a form of paid advertising. Paid by you. For Google Ads, the basic process is that you create an ad that meets Google’s advertising criteria that targets a few search terms, then set how much you’re willing to spend for the ad and have it run until your budget runs out. You can even create an ad with a brief message that has a button to call you directly, and it will work even if you don’t have a website yet.

SEM is brilliant for bridging the gap from when a site goes live to when it can be found on google. But it’s just as important once things are ticking along nicely. It’s a great way to amplify your marketing strategy, and with some of the sophisticated tools at our disposal, we can constantly monitor and analyse your website. We look at performance and functionality, as well as track your keywords and phrases and compare them with the competition.

If marketing for search engines works, do I even need a website?

If you’re really looking to grow your business then yes, you’ll need a website. While you can see some success through SEM without a website, it will be much more effective if your ad links to a related page on your website that has useful information for your potential customers.  Using the right ad type and setting the right conversion goals for your budget can give you a very effective ad campaign.

But learning SEM is tricky. There are hundreds of different ads and settings to sift through and enough acronyms to make a codebreaker giddy at all the possible meanings. What does PPC stand for? How about CPV? ECPM? LTV? DVD? Okay, that last one is Digital Versatile Disc, but the rest are all about ads. And if you’re in the stage when you can pay for faster results, why not pay for someone who knows the platform while you’re at it? We have a certified and experienced Google Ads team here to help and can save you dozens and dozens of hours of training, and remember, time is money!