Search engine marketing (SEM) is a digital marketing strategy used to increase the visibility of a website on search engine result pages (SERPs). It involves the promotion of a business through paid ads that appear on SERPs.
Advertisers
bid on keywords that users of services such as Google and Bing can enter when they search for certain products or services, giving them the opportunity for their ads to appear next to the results of those search queries. SEM is a cost-effective way to improve businesses and brands, as appearing high on SERPs makes brands and products more visible.Search engines use a metric known as a quality score to rank search engine ads from different competitors. If you bid the same as your competitor, a higher quality score means that you will appear above your competitor in the search engine. WordStream's free keyword tool provides you with a variety of valuable information, such as the search volume of each individual keyword on Google and its overall competitiveness. The two main search networks that SEM professionals target are Google Ads (formerly Google Adwords) and Bing Ads.
The greatest strength of search engine marketing is that it offers advertisers the opportunity to show their ads to motivated customers who are ready to buy at the precise moment they are ready to make a purchase. While Bing provides most search results for Ecosia, there are ways to support Ecosia with marketing spending. Bing ranks second with a market share of 4.36%, Yahoo ranks third with a market share of 3.3% and the Chinese search engine Baidu ranks fourth globally with a share of around 0.68%. Although a larger advertising budget can be advantageous, especially when targeting highly competitive keywords, it is far from being a requirement for successful search engine marketing.
AdWords is recognized as a web-based advertising tool, as it adopts keywords that can explicitly send ads to web users looking for information about a particular product or service. Unlike most digital advertising, PPC advertising is not intrusive and does not interrupt your tasks. Since you're already making an investment in search engine marketing to drive traffic to your website, it's worth optimizing that traffic for conversions and increasing the efficiency of your spending. For the most part, customers in the e-commerce industry use ads, as SEA aims to persuade the user to buy.
Some have lobbied for paid listings to be labeled as ads, while advocates insist that they are not really ads, since webmasters don't control the listing's content, its ranking, or even whether it's shown to users. The term search engine marketing was popularized by Danny Sullivan in 2001 to cover the spectrum of activities involved in conducting SEO, managing paid listings in search engines, submitting sites to directories, and developing online marketing strategies for companies, organizations and individuals. That's a key difference between Google and other search engines because Google only shows ads above and below search results.
