5 SEM Strategies Your Business MUST Use

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is one of the most important aspects of digital marketing. An effective SEM strategy gets businesses visibility on search engines, thus increasing its brand awareness, driving traffic to its website and ultimately increasing its sales.

SEM is implemented via paid efforts such as pay-per-click (PPC) marketing, display and remarketing advertisements. However, getting these various strategies right to ensure their effectiveness, isn’t always easy. Here are a few tactics to ensure an effective and successful SEM strategy.

1. Use Long-Tail Keywords – Long-tail keywords are highly-focused and specific keywords. While they do not get the high search volume of more commonly used keywords, the conversion rate from them is significantly higher. This is because more often than not, an individual using a long-tail keyword in their search means they already have a very strong idea of what it is they are searching for. This also means they may be further along the buyer’s journey, making the possibility of a sale for your business, higher. Long-tail keywords are also not as competitive when bidding, versus more generic, commonly used keywords.

• Focus on Top ROI Products & Services – Products and services with the highest ROI essentially indicate that there is a strong and robust market for them. And more importantly that these are the products and services that most appeal to a business’ target audience. In most cases, there is a fixed budget for a company’s SEM strategy, which means ensuring that every bit counts. Focusing on driving their target audience to the products and services with proven results simply makes the most sense.

• Start Small – It’s easy to get a little too excited and want to create five, six, maybe even seven SEM campaigns at once, to reach as many different target audiences as possible, as well as push the various products and services your business offers. However, pushing too many campaigns at once runs the risk of their overlapping and that hurting the performance of each. It also means a larger distribution of the company’s limited budget. It’s also harder to accurately measure and monitor the campaigns to see what’s working and not working, what needs to be tweaked, etc. It is best to start with two, no more than three individual campaigns.

• Do Not Ignore Other Search Engines – We all know that Google is King, with an estimated 65% of searches conducted on the search engine. And by all means, Google Ads are a must for any SEM campaign. That said, while they may not have as large numbers as Google, a few other search engines still hold their own very well. Bing, Yahoo, and Ask.com, for example, all boast a respectable share of the search market and could be worth including in an SEM strategy. As is always the case, businesses must consider the demographics of their target audience, e.g. age, gender, location, etc. and research how they like to receive information. Businesses must also consider their industry and products and services and what search engines are commonly used for said industry and/or products and services. Armed with that knowledge, a business can successfully incorporate another search engine into its SEM campaign that may yield big rewards.

• Develop Outreach Content – Link building, i.e. external sites linking to another company’s website and thus directing traffic from their site to said company, is a very effective SEM tactic. One way to successfully achieve this is to create what is considered outreach content. That is, content meant for distribution and dissemination by other sources. For example, creating content to pitch to various influencers, top-rated publications, media sources, etc. Having your brand content linked to by credible sources with significant reach is a great way to get noticed by a potential customer who may have never heard of you otherwise.

Let Yello successfully guide your next SEM campaign. Contact us today to learn more.