Ever wondered how search engines display tempting offers at the top or on the right of search results? You search for hotels, and the best hotel deals show up. How is the search engine able to do that? That’s accomplished through Search Engine Marketing (SEM).

SEM is the practice of advertising your business on search engines and their partner websites. Though SEM is sometimes considered to be overlapping with SEO and SMM, we consider SEO and SMM as separate means of online marketing. In SEM, when users search for terms related to your business, or read content related to your business, your business is advertised to them. If those users click on your business advertisements, they are led straight to your website.

SEM is a paid form of online marketing. You need to pay the search engines an amount proportional to the number of users that are sent to your website. That means, you require to secure an advertising budget before you can employ SEM.

You then need to enroll into the search engines’ advertising network, where you can create your own advertisements and publish them to attract your target audience. Your advertisements can be targeted to selected demographics and geographies, during time zones that matter, and exactly when users are looking for content that relates to your business.

You need to create advertising campaigns, which then need to be actively managed through a bidding process such that you get the best returns for your investment. In a sense, SEM is an ongoing activity that requires dedicated attention. If done inefficiently, you could be wasting money on your SEM campaigns while your competitors get more potential customers visiting their website by spending lesser money than you are.

Further, each search engine has detailed policies and rules that need to be adhered to while creating your advertisement campaigns, with rules that even scrutinize the quality of the corresponding website and underlying business that you are trying to advertise through them. Grasping the details of all those policies and standards can be a daunting task. If you fail to abide by the rules laid down by the search engines, your account can get banned forever. And that would mark the end of your SEM. Now, who would want to get banned by Google? Businesses with the best of intentions have got banned that way, many a times without any warnings or opportunities for rectifying their mistakes, and without any explanations for the lifetime ban.

Considering that the process of SEM is not very easy, requires dedicated time and continual effort, requires skills and tact to get the best value for money, and comes at a risk of losing eligibility of your business for using SEM altogether, it is best to entrust SEM activities to experts, while you focus on your core business.

At Excelory, we first perform a gap analysis of your website to check for any serious violations of the rules laid down by the search engines, and provide feedback on any enhancements that may be required. Once that is taken care of, we perform a basic study of your business needs in consultation with your marketing department, and subsequently come up with a SEM plan that would work for your business. We proceed with the execution of the SEM campaign(s) only after receiving your approval on the plan.

One question that might bother you as a customer is, how would you know whether the SEM work that we do for you directly benefits your business? Well, the results that you get from the SEM that we perform on behalf of your business speak for themselves. Moreover, we prove the effectiveness of the SEM campaigns to you through data points that can be measured and traced back to how the campaign was executed. With us, you can rest assured that your SEM budget will generate the best returns on investment. Contact us for a free consultation session to see how SEM can increase your sales significantly.