: German Language
SEM Consultants - search engine marketing
This is the SEM acronym as opposed to the SEO (search engine optimisation) and SMM (social media marketing) acronyms; what is it, well it's exactly what it breaks down to and that is marketing a website for the search engines, the most important being: Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, &c.
There are quite a few approaches to SEM, the most popular being:
- Paid advertising
- Social Media marketing
- Add a Blog to Your Website
- Blog marketing
Before I discuss each of the above, we should be aware of SEMs purpose, it is similar to SEO in that it is designed to promote a website to perform well in the search engines. The main difference being that on the whole SEM is off-website optimisation, whereas SEO on the whole is on-website optimisation.
how does SEM work?
Paid advertising, commonly known as PPC: the most popular program that runs this type of marketing, and which most people are familiar with is Google Ads [formerly AdWords]. How does it work, well basically the website owner is in control, they create their own adverts and choose the keywords to activate them within the Google Ads interface, they are also in total control of the budget they spend, be that daily or monthly. But as anything Google it's not as simple as it initially seems, and if your not careful your spend can go array on the wrong keywords (you're not spending more than your required budget here, you're just spending it on the wrong stuff) and if you're not tracking it correctly (that is, setting up the correct conversion tracking), well you could be tipping your money away without knowing your ROI (return on investment).
Social Media marketing is about the most important form of on-line marketing now, that is once you're generating an income through your PPC efforts or your organic SEO has taken off. The main contenders are Google Business Profile Manager, Mastodon, X, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and the list goes on - it's best to carry out a little research to see which channel is best suited not only to your business but also to how you operate as a business person. Google My Business is extremely important and integrating it with your website and blog is essential, likewise integrating it with your Google Ads campaign by using extensions. X, well fortunately we've gotten past the "guess what I just seen" Tweet [or Xt...] and people have sort of... started to realise X's true marketing potential. If you're a business person you must have a LinkedIn profile, people like to check out who they're doing business with and LinkedIn helps a lot, so imagine if you're not listed. Instagram, Pinterest - well give me a shout and I can go into detail on these and the plethora of other social media websites - all designed to help your website / business within their specific niche.
Add a Blog to Your Website This is definitely the way ahead and it's all I'm recommending at present when it comes to what was previously known as 'article marketing'.
Why? Well, why should someone else get all the authority for those great articles you write, and likewise why should someone else make you edit an article which your perfectly happy with - just because it doesn't quite fit in with their website's ethos.
As a whole lots, and I mean lots, of these eZine websites have gone by the wayside, why - basically because they used your article to bump up their PPC ad revenue.
So you've created a Blog, it's not on a subdomain, meaning it looks like this:
http://www.YOURWEBSITE.com/blog/
And not like this:
http://blog.YOURWEBSITE.com/
This way all the articles add to the authority of your domain name.
But there's only one thing worse than not having a Blog and that’s having an empty Blog.
So you need to add articles to the Blog, but you say you're too busy – not a problem, because that's where we can help; give us the smattering of an idea and we'll put together a great article no less than 450 words long, covering all the attributes which will endear it to Google's latest Hummingbird update – meaning, pretty much, the semantic web.
It also doesn't stop there, because if your website, to begin with, hasn't a very broad reach, then you won't get many readers – so once again we'll step in to ensure it gets nicely marketed.
Blog marketing is not as successful as it was (due to 'great article!' aficionados getting carried away with their spamming), but it's still a way of increasing your profile on the web. How does it work? When you read articles on the web or on Blogs of other people in your industry and you want to add your comments - you can and naturally you'll ensure your comment links back to your website - well that's it. But don't just scribble, as above “great article”, it's not likely to be accepted, ask a question, expand on the authors ideas, this way you will interact with the author, which is exactly what they want you to do (why else would they have written it), and you know what you've a win - win situation and in my opinion that's the purpose of the web a generosity in the form of altruism.
So if your SEM campaigns need a little pick-me-up - then give us, your SEM specialists a shout – we'll be more than happy to help.
web consultancy services
- SEO - Search Engine Optimisation
- PPC - Google Ads
- SEM - Search Engine Marketing
- Social/ New Media Marketing
- Website Management
- Website Business Consultancy
- Website Analytics and Reporting
- Website Performance Overview
- Website Usability Testing
- Technical SEO (Code Analysis)
- Information Architecture (Site Hierarchy)
- Website Project Management