What is SEM? How search marketing works

What is SEM?

Search engine marketing or SEM, as the name suggests, is one of the forms of digital marketing implementation currently in use. In essence, SEM involves the online promotion of a company's marketing subject using a website, optimizing its performance and making it more attractive and meaningful to search engines. A high ranking of the importance of a website is a high probability of ensuring the visibility of its pages in search engines.

The most popular search engines in Pakistan are G o o g l e and Ya index.

Let me remind you that marketing is to satisfy the needs of consumers with goods and services. Manipulating a website in order to make it suitable for search engines is hardly called marketing, rather, it refers to IT activities, since it involves, first of all, an understanding of search engine algorithms, site ranking principles and web mastering skills .

Understanding this, and in the future we will refer to it as “search marketing”, because: (a) it just so happened and (b) it still has to do with marketing.

Components of Search Marketing

Search marketing includes three components of interaction with search engines:

• SEO (search engine optimization) is a complex work on:
  • Internal optimization of the structure, code and content of the site;
  • External site optimization - optimization of site parameters to the requirements defined by search engines.
• SEA (search engine advertising) - one of the options (or both at once) for displaying an advertising message:
  • Search advertising - advertising in search engines on the ranking pages;
  • Context-sensitive - on the sites of partner sites for the search engine (YAN - Yandex and KMS - Google AdWords).
• SERM (search engine reputation management) - organization and control of reputation in search engines

The Importance of SEM (Search Engine Marketing) for Marketing

The Internet today is millions of sites and trillions of gigabytes of information distributed over computers connected by a connection. Search engines were created to make it easier to find the information you need. However, the overabundance of available information, its duplication by different sources and the freedom of information, which allows creating, storing both incomplete and frankly false information, makes it necessary for search engines to preliminary analyze information and select the most complete and accurate information that meets the user's request.

Search engine rankings . However, even after filtering and pre-processing, there is too much information and search engines are forced to filter less valuable information and rank the information when it is presented to the user. As a result, at the user's request, information is presented in the form of a rating - a list sorted from the most relevant (according to search engines) information to the least relevant. Thus, search engines in a certain way affect what information the user will receive in the first place. Naturally, in the case of ranking commercial information, competition opens up for the first places in the ranking of search engines.

Advertising in search engines . Understanding the importance of the position in the ranking and the amount of competition, search engines provide an opportunity for companies to pay for displaying ads on the ranking page without changing the order of ranking sites by importance, but allocating special places for displaying such ads.

Advertising on partner sites. In addition, search engines place similar ads on the pages of third-party sites, combining them into a network of partner resources that provide space for such ads. This has nothing to do with the activities of search engines and ratings, but is a separate business line of search engines, the services of which are used by marketing specialists for advertising.

Organization and control of reputation . In terms of PR and sales, the reputation of a company, brand and product affects the commercial and financial performance of the company, and also affects marketing - it forces you to analyze failures and findings, revise positions, improve and correct. However, reputation is also a concern for SEM as it affects search engine rankings. The more mentions (name of the company, product and brand), the more links - the better the performance of search marketing: the higher the ranking in search engines and the cheaper and easier advertising, and the easier it is for the consumer to find information about the subject of marketing on the Internet.

The components of successful competition can be considered:

• Understanding of work algorithms and knowledge of the requirements of search engines
• Competence in web mastering
• Competence in marketing in general and in advertising specifically
• Effort and time spent on this work
• Cost of funds in the marketing budget attributable to SEM.

Let's analyze the components of search marketing separately.

How SMM works

Technologies for analyzing behavior and collecting data about users are developing rapidly, so every year advertising will more and more accurately correspond not only to the current needs of users, but also to their habits and needs. However, the principles of contextual advertising are unchanged:

Semantic core

The advertiser, understanding the demand for the goods he sells, analyzes the requests that the consumer makes to search engines.

1. Consumers often name products differently than they are named by the manufacturer, so the advertiser needs to determine all possible variations of the same name used by the consumer in the search.
2. What are the characteristics of the required product (“option 2”, “firmware 2.2”, “red color”, “power 2000 kW”);
3. What are the important additional features of the product (“with a cappuccinatore”, “fine finish”);
4. It is also necessary to analyze everything that accompanies the purchase, use of the goods (“nearby”, “payment by card”, “service center”, “with delivery”, “with installation”);
5. The consumer is likely to be attentive to the experience of others ("reviews", "opinions", "how to set up");
6. Of course, you need to include commercial queries (“buy”, “price”, “at a discount”, “on a promotion”);

Sources of obtaining information about keywords for compiling the semantic core:

1. Search engine statistics (Wordstat from Yandex or Keyword Planner - Google Ads.);
2. Websites of direct competitors;
3. Sites in the top lines of search results for key queries;
4. Site statistics, clicks - the popularity of requests that lead to the site (for existing sites);
5. Site statistics, bounces - what queries led to the site and the user immediately left the site (for existing sites).
6. Services for working with the semantic core, clustering and SEO analysis (Serpstat, Rush Analytics, etc.).

Filters

There can be a large number of collected words and their combinations, and most of them will be characteristic of the market in general, the industry, competitors, but not you, your site and your digital marketing goals. Filtering is used to exclude non-target words. If the business develops locally in one or more cities or regions, use the regional filter.

Request frequency

Pay attention to how often keywords are used: high frequency, medium frequency and low frequency. Overly high-frequency words can mean something more than a specific business and global. Then the decision on such words is made individually - into the filter or into use in SEA and SEO.

Grouping keywords

At this stage, you need to combine similar keywords into groups.

1. Some queries and keywords can be synonyms, in fact, naming the same object, action and phenomenon (“Phillips screwdriver”, “Philips answer”).
2. Part of the requests, brought together, denotes a product group (“vase”, “pot”, “flower”, “pot”, “planter”) and such products need to be placed on the site, promoted interdependently (taking into account their indirect competition for the interest of consumers)
3. Often requests are used more often than similar and others, or they more accurately indicate the subject of marketing, which means that more attention should be paid to them and, in the case of concentration of marketing efforts, more attention should be paid to such requests (“cleaning” or “cleaning services”).

The purpose of keyword grouping is to ensure the accuracy of marketing and reduce possible unnecessary costs for development, site optimization and advertising. Once all requests are collected, they need to be distributed to individual pages of the site and included in the content on these pages and in the description of goods and services. This process is called clustering.

Commercial requests, such as "order", "price" or "buy" must be present on the pages of product cards and in the forms for submitting a commercial request (add to cart, buy, order) - in all sections that sell goods. For the section of expert sections and advertising (FAQ, blog, Tech support, Overview), you need to use keywords that answer the questions "how?", "why?", "why?".

Taking into account the proposed and upcoming search advertising (SEA), landing pages are created on the site, to which consumers will come from such advertising.

Landing pages that commercialize specific queries use precise positioning and targeting words (“in a warehouse in Kazan”, “model 22LH450V”, “pot price 2300 rubles”).

Website optimization (SEO)

In accordance with the semantic core, the landing pages of the site and landing pages are prepared for future search advertising. The interconnection of these pages is organized - from the main to the less important, from general information to accurate answers to user questions, the product catalog pages are grouped, the relationship with the company's management is organized, commercial and other services are formed.

A set of measures for external optimization is being implemented - we pay attention to the important and suggest to the search engines the logic of organizing the content of the site, thereby ensuring the elevation of the site's position in the results of search engines for certain user requests. We place informational materials and advertisements on other Internet resources in order to ensure the traffic of visitors to our website.

Search advertising

The advertiser, in anticipation of consumer requests, has placed ads in advance that will be shown on the search results page in response to these requests. This is done through the advertiser's office in search engines. The success of a search ad ad depends on its match between the search query and the content of the web page to which the ad leads, as well as the amount of cost that the advertiser incurs in "purchasing space" for ads and the number of seats purchased (in the case of context-sensitive advertising). advertising).