In my experience, Search Engine Marketing (SEM) has the highest ROI of all traffic channels. This is because, by design, search engine users are seeking and finding what they want, when they want it. From an advertisers perspective, being in a position to know who your prospective customers are and give them exactly what they want, when they want it is a gold mine; although this is where many inexperienced advertisers lose focus and cannibalize their own ROI.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be writing about the basics of utilizing both Paid and Organic Search in tandem to increase the overall return that advertisers get from this invaluable marketing channel. I hope that this overview will help those asking the question “what is search engine marketing?”, while providing some valuable insight for experienced marketers.

What is Search Engine Marketing?

From my perspective, SEM is basically two sub-channels focused on driving traffic from search engine results.

Organic (or “Natural”) Search Engine Optimization (SEO) focuses on gaining higher rankings for relevant terms utilizing the search engine’s proprietary algorithms. Last I read, about 70% of all clicks on a search engine results page are on the organic results. Having a clear SEO strategy and understanding of how each search engine’s algorithms weighs different factors to determine relevancy are essential when engaging in organic search engine optimization.

Paid Search focuses on paying for clicks resulting from self-written text ads which are displayed based on self-selected terms. Having control over the messaging in the text ads, the words that trigger ads and even the specific destination that visitors are sent when clicking on the ad make this channel extremely efficient for a saavy search marketer. (I’ll get into more detail on this in future posts)

Paid Search is often referred to as “SEM”, but given the figure below, I don’t buy into this misused acronym. There are also sub-channels within paid search when you go beyond the traditional search engine. Services like Yahoo’s Product Submit allow advertisers to display their product results in shopping engines on a pay-per-click (PPC) basis. For the sake of simplicity and applicability to the widest audience, I will not focus on these additional paid channels which have a very specific function.

I hope that helps answer the basic question “what is search marketing?”. I’ll try to make future posts more in-depth to add value for those already familiar with SEM.

Next Search Engine Marketing Topic:
Determining Your SEM Strategy