What is Search Engine Marketing?

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is an internet marketing method aimed at increasing the visibility of a website in search engine results. SEM achieves its objective by either optimizing the website or placing advertisements in the search engine.

The process of website optimization leads to increase in the website ranking naturally and is commonly known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO results in increasing the chances of website visibility in Organic searches, also called un-paid or natural searches. The other way is by following a process of placing advertisements, which is done using Paid website inclusion methods.

There is confusion over the usage of the term SEM, as many people apply this term referring to paid advertisements methods alone, ignoring the methods (SEO) involving free or organic searches. But in the real sense, SEM is a broad umbrella term which refers both SEO and paid services.

Both the components of SEM, SEO and paid advertisements have their own advantages and disadvantages. SEO improves a website visibility only on the basis of optimizing its content to the accurate key words. Though SEO is cost effective, the chances of increasing a website’s visibility are limited, due to competition from thousands of websites. In the case of paid advertising services, increased visibility is assured, but at higher costs.

Many search engines these days are experimenting with various payment techniques such as Pay-Per-Click (PPC), Cost-Per-Impression (CPI), etc. to make their paid services more cost effective for the advertisers.

SEM also includes two distinct services namely Search analytics and Web analytics.

• Search analytics involves analysis of the combined search engine data, with an aim to identify the key words frequently used while performing searches. These identified keywords are utilized for optimizing website content.
• Web analytics involves collecting and evaluating the internal data of a website to get better insights about user’s interests in searching the website. These insights can be utilized for better customization of the website.

/Ruben