What is Search Engine Marketing
In out series our journey to help out readers understand digital marketing well, we are back with a piece of info on what is Search Engine Marketing? and all about its associated jargons. So, let’s get started.

In digital terms What is search engine marketing?
Known as the most effective ways of growing business online in this era of competition, Search Engine Marketing makes the advertising online easier. It is way of promoting and growing your business online with a benefit of wider audience.

This basically works on SERPs (Search Engine results page). These pages are web pages shown to users when they search for something on a search engine, such a Google. Google accounts for 92.05% of traffic online so it can be indirectly said that paid search marketing is entirely driven by Google.

The search engine market share

Feature of SERPs was introduced by Google back in 2012 that gave a boost to what we understand today. Every SERP is unique in nature even if you search with the same credentials and same keywords. This is because virtually all search engines customize SERP for the users by presenting results based on a wide range of factors beyond their search terms, such as the user’s physical location, browsing history, and social settings. Many SERPs may appear similar, and contain many of the same results but will often feature subtle differences.

As SEM includes both unpaid (Organic) and paid efforts, let’s understand these terms first.

Organic Results
Organic results are unpaid results that appear on the search engine’s algorithm. This content is ranked high by optimizing web page through various techniques.

Following is the result of organic search:

The box on the right side of the page is called Knowledge graph. This feature was introduced by Google in 2012 that pulls data to frequently asked questions from different sources across the internet to answer in the one central location. In this photo you can see information about Bhagat Singh, such as the date and place of his birth, his height, the date on which he was attained martyrdom- many if these terms will have the own links.

Paid Results
Paid results are those that have been paid to display certain ad by an advertiser. Paid search marketing is about bidding and buying relevant keywords. This is totally different from organic one these are paid and the latter one is natural. In the past, paid results were exclusively limited to small, text-based ads that were typically displayed above and to the right of the organic page results. Todays, paid results can take a wide range of forms, and there are dozens of advertising formats for the needs and demands of the advertisers. Paid search marketing is entirely driven by Google these days.

In this example, all the results on the SERP are paid results. The top listed ads are marked with a yellow advertisement sticker. These are PPC ads and feature ad extensions for any potential customer to navigate to specific page on their official website.

The image based ads on the right side of the SERP are Shopping ass, a feature offered by Google AdWords platform that allows e-commerce businesses product information to be displayed alongside the results on a specific SERP.

Now that we are done with the basic meaning of Search Engine Marketing, let’s go deep into various metrics that are used to optimize websites and types of search engine marketing.

Types of search engine marketing
Keyword Research
Keyword research is a method determining words and phrases that people use to search in search engines, like Google, Bing and YouTube. This impacts every other SEO task that you perform, including finding content topics, on page-SEO, email outreach and the promotion of that content. This is the start of any SEO campaign and will guide you throughout content creation. The keywords research is for both organic and paid search marketing.

One bonus points of keywords research is that it helps the retailer know about target customers and what they are searching. The researchers will determine those specific terms customers are using to find anything online. Once you learn what specific terms are affecting your target audiences, you can optimize your strategy, make content accordingly and also prepare the next blog.

Keywords research isn’t just a one time task .The foundation of all you content on web is based on them so regular evaluation and maintenance is to be done.

Some of the best keywords research tools are Google AdWords, KWfinder, Ubersuggest and Soovle to name a few.

Website Saturation and backlinks:
Website saturation is the number of webpages and related files that a search engine indexes from your business’s content. Search engines rank the websites that have a larger number of pages attached to this website.

How many pages and which pages of your site are showing up on the search engine? Is the search engine not seeing certain sections of your website?

We can also know how the competitors sites measure up. If their content is getting greater saturation, we can use theirs as a benchmark for improving your own.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
Pay-Per-Click of Google AdWords vis Google’s own form of line advertising. Advertisers bid their money on ‘trigger’ words and phrases which prompt their ads to display in sponsored search results. Advertisers are supposed to pay a fee every time someone clicks on their ad.

These advertisements will appear at the top or at the bottom of the SERP labelled as “sponsored” or an “Ad”. These ads are customized to be displayed on specific search queries and as soon as the they are scheduled and budgeted, they will start showing up in search results.

Google’s quality score determines the quality and relevance of those keywords and PPC ads. It will determine CPC (Cost per click) multiplied by your maximum bud to determine your ad rank in the ad auction process.

Local and Organic
local SEO is a type of search engine optimization that focuses on getting your business listings in the Google map without any charges whereas Organic SEO is a process that results in your website content gaining popularity in unpaid, non local results. There will be no charge for clicks through to you site. The positioning in local search results is largely influenced by various factors like:

Google My Business (GMB) listing
The category of your business
Online reviews
Citations
The architecture of your website
Content
Backlinks
Search engine marketing and SEO are interconnected and complex to differ. It become very hard to decide where to invest and where not especially if your business is small and with a limited budget. Remember that every business is special and requires a customized business marketing model to continue playing online.

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