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Search engine marketing is the strategy of using pay-per-click, online advertising, to promote your company's products and services. Because of the nature of search engine marketing (SEM) it has one of the highest probability of reaching your target audience at the right time, which results in a higher conversion ratio for your marketing spend.

What is Search Engine Marketing?

All major search engines such as Google and Yahoo have pay-per-click offerings which allow companies to purchase space on the search results page for their chosen keywords. Usually these results are shown separately from the actual, or organic search results, so that search engine users are aware which results are paid for. The underlying principle for the search engine is to protect the integrity of their search results.

Benefits of search engine marketing

By giving you the ability to place adverts in front of potential customers at the point where they are searching for information that relates to your products and services, you have a higher probability of reaching your correct target audience.

In addition, because you are reaching them at a time they are actively looking for information relating to your products and services you have a far greater chance of converting the potential customers into an actual customer.

No other form of marketing offers such targeted marketing at the same, low cost as SEM.

Most companies today continue to use traditional advertising media to reach potential customers. Print, radio and television advertising is expensive, and compared to search engine marketing, a shot gun approach to reaching your target audience. SEM allows for highly targeted advertising spend whilst, in most cases, being considerably cheaper than the traditional alternatives.

How does it work?

In most cases companies compete for their chosen keywords by bidding on the keyword of interest. The higher your bid relative to your competitors the higher your advert will appear in the pay-per-click list.

To have an effective search engine marketing campaign you need to:

• Pick the correct keywords to bid on. (Correct does not necessarily mean the most relevant keyword. Your choice should take into account costs and degree of competition for the keyword),
• Analyse your competitor's adverts for content and keyword choice,
• Ensure you cost-per-click, the conversion rate of click to sales and return on sales make economic sense,
• Monitor the results of your campaign and,
• Manage and tweak your campaign over time.

The effective use of search engine marketing enables you to steal a march on your competitors who are stuck using more traditional advertising channels. In South Africa SEM is relatively immature which provides an additional advantage to companies that start to use it effectively as their is relatively little competition for keywords.