Search Engine Marketing / SEM

SEM and SEO are two different things, and it’s important to fully understand why. Although SEO is the buzzword we are probably more familiar with, SEM is really probably the more relevant concern.  The clue is in the “M”. SEM deals with all aspects of marketing that pertain to the search engines.* The main difference between SEM and SEO is this. SEO concerns itself with the attainment of high rankings in the search engines; SEM concerns itself with the use of the search engines in marketing.

The easiest way to understand the difference is this. You can promote any kind of web page to the top of the rankings with SEO: it could be a Blogger blog, a Website, A Youtube Video, a Facebook page, and so forth. SEM deals with the much larger picture of how you utilize the search engines as part of your marketing strategy.

So, questions such as:- what you promote, what kind of content it contains, how you present your content, how people are attracted to your content at every stage of the process, and ultimately, how they are encouraged to convert from page visitors into people who engage and interact with your content and your business, all these concerns are the concerns of search engine marketing.

Search Engine Marketing In Action

A strategic example of Search Engine Marketing would be the

implementation of a meta description that differentiates you from

your competition. Google is now presenting more and more varied

meta descriptions, including things like starred reviews, rich snippets,

author profiles including images, (as here). Using these kinds of

supplementary information can play a huge role in attracting people to

your website. In fact, people are far more predisposed to click on, say,

an image than a plain meta description.

More On SEM

We mentioned various facets of SEM above. We will briefly expand on those areas:

1) What you promote: there are various different platforms you can promote. It doesn’t have to be a website, it can if appropriate be a Facebook Business page, A Google+ brand Page, and so on. The only constraint in SEM is the marketing end goal. If your end goal is sales, and promoting a review on a reviews’ site is the way forward, so be it.

2) How people experience your web property at every stage. SEM begins with your search engine listing. That small piece of web real estate contains quite a bit of information. In many ways it is akin to a small ad. How you present yourself here is vital. Just because you are number one in the rankings, there is no preset that assures you 50% of the clicks. If the meta description, URL and Title Tags send out the wrong message, you can lose clicks. For instance a sloppy or scrambled URL can be off-putting. Conversely, using metadata and the various search engine protocols correctly can enable you to have a dynamic and vibrant listing, one which automatically gets people clicking. For instance, a video listing at the bottom of the first page of the search engines can still out perform listings higher up the page….

3) Once people arrive on your web property, the engagement and conversion process continues. There are of course a ton of different factors in play once people arrive on your website. The combined disciplines of useability studies, site analytics, customer feedback and conversion rate optimization are all instrumental in understanding your site visitors, and how to engage them and convert them into customers.

*  Since Google Adwords, loosely known as PPC, (the placing of adverts in the search engine listings), is strictly speaking a form of search engine marketing, it comes under the banner of SEM. But PPC, paid advertising, is a completely different genre of advertising to SEO, which is why we don’t digress into this subject in this piece.