What Is Search Engine Marketing (SEM)?

With an increasing number of customers researching and online shopping, search engine marketing has become an online key marketing strategy to expand the scope of a brand.

While you don’t want to rely exclusively on search engines to get you, customers, and clients, they shouldn’t be overlooked either. SEO tactics are free and websites are still surfing and ranked by the search engines so it doesn’t hinder them from finding the website.

Search engine marketing definition

Search engine marketing (SEM) is a digital marketing technique used in the search engine results pages (SERPs) to improve the popularity of a web site and it exclusively applies to paid search ads.

Search engine marketing consists of a collection of resources, tactics, and methods aimed at optimizing search engine ads, reaching to be among the top spots, achieving lower costs per click, and maximizing ad-derived conversions.

For example, Google Ads is the most commonly known and used SEM network, but other solutions exist too, such as Bing Ads for example.

Google Ads (formerly Google Adwords) and the Bing Ads are the two primary search networks which SEM professionals target quite frequently.

In fact, Google AdWords is basically made out of two networks: Google Search Network and Google Display Network. The first network consists solely of Google-owned search related websites, while the second contains resources such as Twitter, Blogger, and Gmail.

Because you are already investing money in search engine marketing to get traffic to your website, optimizing the traffic for sales and the productivity of your expenditure is a worthwhile endeavor.

On the other hand, Google enables and supports A/B testing, and has previously claimed that performing an A/B or multivariate test does not present any inherent risk to the search rank of your website. Even so, it’s important to keep in mind that the search rank can be compromised by other misuses of A/B testing tools for purposes such as cloaking.

A/B checking the landing pages is a simple way to optimize the budget, either by maximizing the average order value or the per page revenue.