Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is a subset of internet marketing, which uses a combination of free and paid techniques to ensure the achievement of the client's objectives. The central idea behind any search engine marketing campaign is to ensure a high ranking for a website in search engine result pages. The need for Search Engine marketing arose because users wanted faster results.
Organic SEO techniques are time consuming and results usually take many months or weeks to show up. Clients who want instant results often resort to search engine-marketing campaigns, which include sponsored listings, pay per click campaigns and similar such paid techniques to obtain high ranking on search engines.
Sponsored listings are a sure shot way of achieving high ranks on search engines. Depending on the kind of money, a customer is ready to pay; search engines alter the ranks of companies in search results for certain defined keywords. Another way to achieve high ranking on search engines is to bid for certain keywords in search engines. Most search engines allow users to customize their ad campaigns in line with their advertizing and marketing budgets. By bidding for certain keywords, users can improve their rankings in search engine result pages. However, this method can prove to be quite expensive, as users need to increase the bids if their ranking does not improve in search engines.
Other paid methods of improving your website's ranking are CPM and CPC. Cost per (thousands) Impression (CPM) technique enables users to pay for their advertisements only when the page has been rendered at least a thousand times on the browser of each unique visitor. A customer's account is debited only after thousand impressions have been rendered. Such methods are however frank to fraud and require proper management through web analytical software's.
Cost per Click campaigns on the other hand require user s to pay for each validated click made by web surfers. Users can set the lower and upper limits for the payments that they are going to make to their advertisers on a daily basis. If users want, they can choose to pay for only those visitors who end up filling an online query form. This method will ensure that they end up paying for only genuine questions. However, this method is also vulnerable to fraud and requires web analytic software for effective management and execution.
Search Engine marketing has become immensely popular as it provides a measurable method for advertisers to evaluate the return on their advertising spend. Other mediums like print, TV, radio, although effective, do not possess the ability to inform advertisers about the direction of their marketing spend.