What is search engine marketing (SEM)?

Search engines today are trans­port­a­tion hubs for the in­form­a­tion on the World Wide Web. Together with e-mail com­mu­nic­a­tion, web searches are by far the most fre­quently used ap­plic­a­tions of the internet. Those trying to locate in­form­a­tion, products, or service providers online generally tend to use search engines such as Google, Bing, or Yahoo. Con­versely, web content that does not appear in the results lists of these search engines es­sen­tially remains invisible to internet users. For this reason, it is es­pe­cially crucial for online stores and retailers to secure a prominent position in these search result lists to generate as many internet visitors as possible. By using various methods of search engine marketing (SEM), websites are able to increase their vis­ib­il­ity.

SEM entails placing paid ads in search engines (SEA = search engine ad­vert­ising) as well as im­ple­ment­ing measures to increase a website’s ranking in the organic search results by op­tim­ising content (SEO = search engine op­tim­isa­tion).

Together with its sub-dis­cip­lines of SEO and SEA, search engine marketing is con­sidered to be the most important online-marketing channel currently available. One reason for this is SEM’s fun­da­ment­ally different approach to ad­vert­ising measures when compared to more con­ven­tion­al online marketing channels. While display ad­vert­ising, e-mail marketing, social media ad­vert­ising, or offline ad­vert­ising all fall under the category of “push strategies”, SEM occurs through “pull marketing”. Instead of receiving a barrage of un­so­li­cited ads, as is the case in tra­di­tion­al marketing efforts, customers search Google, or another search engine, for things like “buy shoes” or “order groceries”, thereby revealing their intention to purchase a par­tic­u­lar good or service to the ad­vert­iser. Following this, search-related ad­vert­ise­ments are con­sidered to be valuable clues about future customer behavior. Taking advantage of this knowledge enables search engine marketing activ­it­ies to greatly cut down on scatter loss.

Search engine markets in most countries are typically dominated by one single provider. Globally Google has about 90 percent of the desktop search engine market share and about 94 percent of the mobile market share. The figure in the UK at the moment is at around 88 percent, with the rest of the market shared between Bing, Yahoo, AOL, etc.  Other country-specific search engines include Russia’s Yandex and China’s Baidu. While these search engines enjoy market-leader status at home, they remain largely ir­rel­ev­ant to the rest of the world.

As sub­com­pon­ents of the larger framework of search engine marketing, search engine ad­vert­ising (SEA) and search engine op­tim­isa­tion (SEO) both share the same goal: to gain more visitors for a website. Where these two in­stru­ments vary, however, is in their re­spect­ive uses. While SEA focuses on fee-based fade-in ad­vert­ise­ments that appear in tandem with the search results, SEO strategies rely on an entirely different approach: op­tim­ising a website’s organic search results.  With SEO, the search result ranking is not entirely dependent on ad­vert­ising budgets. Instead, websites seeking to increase their placement are required to follow the rules that the relevance-based al­gorithms of search engines have laid out.

Due to the dominance of Google in the United States, search engine ad­vert­ising commonly takes the form of the Google product, AdWords. In addition to normal search engine result lists, this programme also delivers fade-in ad­vert­ising images and texts that are triggered to appear once a specially assigned keyword is used. These ad­vert­ise­ments generally appear high­lighted in the right side of the browser window and before and after the organic search results. Search engine providers rely on companies’ will­ing­ness to shell out large sums of money on search engine ad­vert­ising, with Google gen­er­at­ing more than 95% of its turnover from AdWords revenue alone. There is no charge for simply depicting an ad­vert­ise­ment in the search result list. Payment is only required after a user has clicked on an ad­vert­ise­ment, and, as a result, accessed the ad­vert­iser’s website. Costs for this service are not fixed, rather they are de­term­ined through an auc­tion­ing process. Whether and to what extent an ad appears during searches is de­term­ined by more than the just the amount of the customer’s bid. In order to deliver users the most relevant results for fade-in ad­vert­ise­ments, ads are first cat­egor­ised using Quality Score and sub­sequently displayed in the order of their relevance from the user’s per­spect­ive.  

Website operators wishing for prominent locations in the organic search result lists have a more wide-ranging task to deal with than their SEA-focused coun­ter­parts. Measures enabling a website to or­gan­ic­ally appear higher in the search engine result pages (SERPS) are what encompass the practice known as search engine op­tim­isa­tion (SEO). SEO is comprised of two different sub­cat­egor­ies: on page op­tim­isa­tion, which shapes websites so that they are easier for search engines to read, and off page-op­tim­isa­tion, which primarily has to do with the practices of link marketing.   

• On page SEO measures: op­tim­ising website content according to in­form­a­tion quality, keyword op­tim­isa­tion, ap­pear­ance, and technical ad­just­ments of a search engine friendly page structure (header, html tags, internal links, etc.)
• Off page SEO measures: op­tim­ising incoming links according to qual­it­at­ive and quant­it­at­ive aspects: search engine-optimised backlink profiles and sup­port­ing presence in social networks through social signals.

Compared to other online marketing channels, search engine op­tim­isa­tion offers a sig­ni­fic­ant advantage in terms of sus­tain­ab­il­ity. While search engine marketing with purchased ads are only as good as their re­spect­ive ad­vert­ising budgets, SEO op­tim­isa­tions in the on page and off page sub­cat­egor­ies continue to win over new customers long after their initial in­vest­ments have been accounted for. Websites that secure good positions in organic searches through SEO op­tim­isa­tion ensure a steady stream of site visitors for years. Marketing channels, such as SEA or display ads, on the other hand, only generate visitors as long as the ad­vert­ise­ment is being run.