In 2021, nearly 65% of Google searches ended without clicking on any web address! SEM, otherwise known as Search Engine Marketing, may become a necessary part of your marketing strategy if you want your business to be found online.
This type of campaign uses paid advertising to ensure that your small business's products or services are visible on the search engine results pages (SERPs). When your target audience types in a specific keyword or phrase, SEM enables your ad to appear as a result of that search query.
The search engine marketing benefits are vast, but is it necessarily a good tactic for small business owners to use? In this blog, we’ll go over why small businesses may turn to SEM, the immediate benefits they can work towards, and other reasons why SEM may not be for you.
Why Small Businesses Use Search Engine Marketing
SEM is an effective tool for increasing your small business website traffic without spending months on organic outreach. Because your ad can go live in as little as an hour, companies needing immediate attention to a campaign, product, or service, could benefit from this strategy.
Most small businesses take years to be successful, despite the overnight success some companies show on TikTok. With SEM, small business owners can get their brand in front of the right audience, at the right buying time, instantly.
If your campaign goals aren’t necessarily sales, SEM is also an excellent tool for the beginning stages of your buyer’s journey. Because you can bid on keywords your competitors might use, such as a key phrase, brand word, or even name, your company has the ability to draw in customers originally searching for your competition.
As you can see, the search engine marketing benefits cover all users from the beginning of their buyer’s journey all the way to the end.
Three Immediate Search Engine Marketing Benefits
Reaching The Right Clients Instantly
SEM is often used as a short-term strategy to quickly bring in leads due to the limited budgets of a small businesses.
With your ad, you can choose which keyword and search intent will be most beneficial to show your ad. Targetting the keywords and phrases your audience is searching for when they're ready to buy is the quickest way to increase your chances of conversion.
If you have a larger budget, you may have room to bid on keywords targeting earlier stages of the buyer's journey or even terms that are loosely related to your products. This allows you to create new leads who may have gone to a competitor instead.
These would be more broad searches such as “What gets any stain out of a carpet?” or “The most flattering wedding dresses for my body type.” As you can see, these searches aren’t necessarily looking for a specific product or service, but rather an overall answer to their problem.
With SEM, you can tailor your ad and answer their inquiry by showcasing how your company can solve this, and many other problems. They may not buy the carpet cleaner from you right now, but if your ad is enticing enough, they might follow your brand to see what else you offer that is worth checking out.
Increased Traffic and Brand Awareness
To obtain sales, your business must be visible to users online. Organically ranking high, on the other hand, can be a time-consuming and exhausting effort in the long run.
When we surveyed our clients in the summer of 2021, every one of our responders marked "Brand Awareness" as one of their top two pain points when running a small business. With SEM, you can get directly in front of your audience without having to wait to build up your brand visibility.
User and Buyer Data Available
SEM is a very effective way for businesses to reach specific customers based on their search intentions. Because of this, it's one of the quicker ways to learn who your specific audience is.
By running A/B testing on your copy, offerings, landing pages, or other aspects, you learn more and more about what your audience prefers and the best type of ads to run in the future.
This type of data is beneficial to every level of your marketing strategy, as these details can be utilized for web content, social media content, and even email marketing. By understanding what words and phrases your audience responds to the best, that information can be used elsewhere to boost your sales and conversions.
Disadvantages of Search Engine Marketing
Higher Costs
SEM is not free. In fact, it can cost quite a bit of money in the beginning. If you’re unsure of what type of ad your audience will respond to best, running tests and spending time evaluating your results takes time. Considering most SEM is PPC (pay-per-click), your audience still charges your bank account every time your ad is clicked on - regardless of whether it ends in a purchase or not.
However, learning how your ROAS is being spent and utilizing different aspects can help cushion this blow.
Traffic Is Only Steady as Long as the Ad Is Up
While increased traffic and brand awareness are the two main benefits of search engine marketing, all of that stops as soon as your ad is taken down.
Unfortunately, SEM does not affect your SEO, meaning how well your ad performs doesn’t impact your organic search engine traffic at all. This traffic also isn’t necessarily translated into other aspects of your brand, such as social media, email marketing, webinars, in-person events, or other campaigns/platforms.
While a search engine ad can drive traffic to these areas, it’s up to your small business to keep that user interested enough to follow your brand.
Key Takeaways
The biggest reason SEM fails for some small business owners is that they don’t spend enough time optimizing the rest of the buying process or sales funnel for this user. Once your audience clicks on your ad, the copy, design, and offer on your landing page must be just as compelling as everything that led them there.
Because of this, ensuring your landing page design and copy are perfectly optimized for that audience is vital. If you need help creating a search engine marketing ad, landing page, or branding, press the button below to see how Zoek can help bring you increased online visibility to your brand.
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