What is SEM and what benefits does it bring to my business?
In a world in which digitalisation is constant, in which there are more and more shops with an online presence and in which consumers decide to make purchases online, standing out in search engines is essential. To help us achieve these positions with greater visibility, there is SEO and SEM.
Surely, these two terms may be familiar to you, especially SEO, which we have already talked about in another post. So, now it's SEM's turn! Although it is essential to employ organic strategies to attract traffic to our e-commerce, sometimes it can be difficult to compete in search engines to stand out among so many results without investing money in it. This is where Search Engine Marketing, or SEM, can be a great ally in our digital marketing campaigns. Keep reading and discover how to boost your business with SEM!
What is SEM?
The concept of SEM refers to the practices that are carried out on a website in order to have greater visibility on search engines through advertising campaigns. In other words, SEM are marketing campaigns that allow us to automatically appear in the first results of a search. In the case of Google, SEM ads are displayed above or below the search results as shown in the image.
We must bear in mind that SEM works in a different way to SEO. Although both strategies aim to get visits or conversions on our website through search engines, it is important to clarify that one strategy should not replace the other. Thus, a SEM strategy is recommended if we want to attract customers and obtain results in a short period of time. While an SEO strategy is designed to obtain results in the medium-long term.
As we know that creating an SEM campaign is neither easy or simple, here are some key factors and tools that will help you create an effective strategy.
The first thing you should know is that this type of campaign is based on the PPC strategy or better known as pay per click through search engines. That is, the advertiser pays for each click that a user makes on the ad.
In order for an SEM strategy to achieve the desired objectives, it is important to take into account a number of factors. These include setting a campaign objective such as increasing sales or increasing the number of visits to your website. To meet whatever the objective is, we can take into account the following factors that will help us to achieve them.
Key factors to take into account when creating an SEM strategy
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Create simple, quality keywords. Your keywords should be easy to remember and easy to associate with your brand.
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Select negative words. This is to discard words that you do not want to be associated with your product or service.
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Target by location and language. Campaigns can be targeted to specific geographic areas and people who speak a specific language.
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Identify your target. It is very important to carry out a good segmentation of the audience you want your ads to target.
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Create quality information in advertisements. Advertisements must be attractive and must have correct and valuable information.
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Add useful extensions. Advertisements can contain extra information, which is very useful because you can add a link to the website, social networks, phone numbers, among others.
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Have a responsive website. This means that your web design must adapt to any mobile device to display information in an attractive and intuitive way.
4 key tools for SEM campaigns
Finally, we show you 4 useful tools for the creation of a good SEM campaign:
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HubSpot. With this tool you can track which advertisements are currently active or pending review.
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SEMrush. This is a package of tools for both SEO and SEM. Thanks to it you will have at your disposal the best keywords and you can track your campaigns.
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Google Trends. It is a Google tool that shows the most popular search terms.
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Google Ads Keyword Planner. Through Google Ads, you can easily create campaigns and plan your keywords.