Five Urgent Reasons Your Business Needs SEM
Search Engine Marketing, more commonly known as SEM, is one of the main tools that businesses use so customers can find them. It’s frequently the first place an advertiser chooses to spend their marketing budget. Why? Well, if done correctly, it works! It increases web traffic, awareness, and whatever the ad is driving. So let’s get specific. Below are five urgent reasons your business needs SEM.
1. It’s where the people are.
Need an urgent care that’s open late at night? Google it. Need a special gift for someone but no idea where to start? Ask Google. Need a particular service but none of your friends have a recommendation for you? Google knows. If you’re like 80% of the rest of the world, you use Google to get the answers you need for everything. With that number of people going to one platform, your business really needs to be there with ads offering up your product or service. You can’t be driven by, or fast forwarded, or tuned out – you’re right there on their screen when they’re looking for you.
2. You can’t rely solely on SEO.
Search Engine Optimization is great, and really a necessity for any website. But SEO can only get you so far. You need paid SEM (Google AdWords) to interact with your SEO, and to be there when your SEO is not. For instance, your tags may all be in place on your website, but ten other websites may have even better SEO than you and may rank higher when someone searches for what you’re offering. With paid SEM, you can ensure you’re getting top positioning, as long as your bids, budget, and keyword strategy are where they should be.
3. You get extra advertising space – for free!
With SEM, it won’t just be your website that shows up on a search. The bonus with Google AdWords is that you’ll get to promote yourself not only with exciting ad copy and your website, but also with extra extensions such as sitelinks, callouts, your location, your phone number, etc.! This allows extra space for you to really stand out from other ads, show your business in areas other than the regular ad space, and ultimately get more clicks!
4. You only pay when someone takes an action.
What other ad medium other than digital lets you pay only if someone actually takes the action you want? For things like TV, Radio, Billboards – you’re paying whether someone does what you want or not. On Google, however, you don’t have to pay when someone simply “sees” your ad. You only pay when he or she actively clicks and goes over to your website. Wise use of your money? For sure.
5. Everyone's doing it.
So maybe the “everyone’s doing it” reason is a terrible reason for other things. But for SEM, it’s pretty important. If all your competition is promoting their business with ads, and therefore ranking higher than you, you may get lost. You want to be where your competition is – with better ads. It’s even helpful to bid on competitors’ keywords so you can be there when people search for them. They may not know about you, but if they know about a competitor and you can entice them over to your brand instead, why not?
There are so many more reasons why SEM is important for all types of businesses.
These five should be convincing enough, but if you’re still
wondering if Search Engine Marketing makes sense for you,
just send me an e-mail or give me a call today!
