What is Search Engine Marketing?
Search Engine Marketing or SEM is paramount to every ecommerce business.
Chances are you are leaving no stone unturned in your efforts to get better results from SEM.
Here’s something to think about - when it comes to looking up things on Google, 75% of people never go beyond the first page.
Here’s another one - 93% of online experiences begin with a search engine.
So there you have it - all of this mounts up to show how important web positioning is for the success of your ecommerce business.
Search Engine Marketing is a tactic that uses paid activities to ensure your online store gets noticed by the right user on search engines. In simpler words - online store owners are using SEM strategies to improve the visibility of their brand on search engines. The goal to appear is just one thing - appear higher in the search results and you’re on the right track!
Will SEM give your ecommerce business good results?
Have no doubts on whether you should be putting your money into SEM strategies. If you want to survive the stiff online competition and cut through the noise - SEM is the way up!
Most people often mix up SEO and SEM as these are the most sought after online marketing strategies. SEO involves purely organic activities such as creating optimized content for your ecommerce website, keyword research, and building backlinks to increase traffic to your online store. For SEO - it’s the algorithms that do the work. They look at how relevant your ecommerce website is based on the quality of its content, the links it has with other pages, and how it matches the specific search terms. SEO is great but requires much time to fetch you the desired results.
If you’re looking for a quick way to get in front of your audience - you need to be focusing on SEM. Advertisers have to pay an amount for the clicks received on their Ad. Platforms like Google Adwords are used to rent ad spaces in search engines. Going by the reports, paid search increases conversions more than any other marketing tactics. Running highly targeted ads is key to drive in those leads through SEM.
How can you optimize Search Engine Marketing for your online store?
Search engines like Google and Bing have an auction system in place allowing website owners to bid on keywords that users would choose to use while looking for information, products, or services. This leaves you with a good opportunity to have ads of your online store appear among the first results for those search queries.
If you’re looking to optimize your SEM campaigns, here’s what you should be doing:
- Ensure you’ve got a user-friendly ecommerce website URL - structure it right and use keywords in the URL.
- Take out time to organize your Ad groups - Create small ad groups with targeted ad copies
- Monitor your keywords - Find out what’s working and remove the ones that are not helping you in getting the traffic you need.
- Don’t do everything your competitor does - We tend to watch our competitors closely, but for SEM you need to stand out so set goals and run ads that work for your online venture.
Why should Search Engine Marketing matter to ecommerce business owners?
Here are a few reasons why you should include SEM in your marketing strategies:
- Drives highly qualified traffic to your page: SEM is an effective tool in drawing the user’s attention to your website. It lets customers choose from results based on the words they key in. This means that the traffic directed to your page comprises of potential customers who could be interested in buying from you.
- Creates Visibility: Through SEM, brands can create visibility for their websites by appearing among the top results in search engines.
- Instant Reach: SEM gives you quick results. Since paid Ads appear on top of Google search results, they allow you to connect with potential customers instantaneously.
- Improves Brand awareness: Google Ads let advertisers display their brand name in the headline or description of the Ad. These Ads appear among the first few Google search results, creating more viewership and brand awareness.
- Measures progress: With SEM you can measure the performance of your Ads and see the results that you have achieved on each campaign.
There’s nothing like getting your SEM campaigns right. Once you’ve users coming to your website, the next step would be to get them to make a purchase and have them come back for more. One way you could achieve this by ensuring your customer support is top-notch, you can trust DelighChat’s ecommerce helpdesk to turn your customers into fans!
