Search Engine Marketing

Search engine marketing is the explicit promotion of a website on one or more search engines to attract relevant visitors. Where search engine optimization (SEO) can be compared to PR, search engine marketing is more like advertising.

The objective of search engine marketing, or SEM, is the same as that of search engine optimization and paid inclusion, namely, to drive relevant visitors to your website. (In fact, Paid Inclusion can be considered a form of Search Engine Marketing.) But, unlike the other two methods, SEM generally involves paying a fee for a specific placement in search results and also may involve a fee per visitor who clicks on the ad.

SEM fees can be assessed by each 1,000 impressions, or CPM. In this model, you pay a set fee for each 1,000 times your ad appears on a site somewhere. The CPM model which was often associated with “banner ads” is declining because advertisers are interested in more tangible results.

These tangible results become more apparent in a Cost Per Click, or CPC model. Here the advertiser is not assessed by the number of impressions, but rather by each time a new viewer clicks on the ad and is redirected to a new web page. This model is also referred to as Pay Per Click, or PPC, and is employed by the two major search engine ad providers, Google and Overture. Both Google and Overture use auction-style bidding to influence the relative position of each ad in response to a keyword search, but their implementation is markedly different.

The advantages of SEM over SEO include the advertiser’s authority (within guidelines) over ad content, and the ability to turn a campaign on and off very quickly. For example, if you want to promote a limited-time offer on your website, say for an upcoming seminar, you would use SEM rather than SEO.

The disadvantage of SEM is that you pay for each impression or click, whereas visitor traffic from SEO is free from such charges. Therefore, SEO is more of a strategic initiative.

Many of our clients start out with SEM to drive traffic to their site while the SEO work we have performed for them takes effect. Over time, they can reduce their SEM spending while relevant traffic continues to grow organically.

• Planning and Strategy
  
  
• Website Promotion
  
  
• Visitor Conversion Optimization



• Website Visitor Tracking