What Does SEM Stand For?

In this blog, we will provide our readers with ‘what does SEM stand for’ and briefly break down the ins and outs of SEM.

What Does SEM Stand For?

SEM stands for ‘search engine marketing, and it is the method of promoting and advertising a company’s online presence to rank higher amongst search traffic. This can include website pages and longer, more informational-based content like blogs and news.

Search engine marketing offers businesses a boost to increase their online visibility and attract new customers. It also makes them easier to find online and secure higher traffic. Similarly to SEO, search engine marketing aims to improve how search engine bots rank an organisation’s content.

It is a combination of both organic (SEO) and paid (PPC) search coming together to attract customers. Regarding PPC, SEM allows businesses to purchase ad space at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs). SEO is an organic strategy focussing more on organic rankings through optimising content for search engines so content receives a higher SERP ranking.

How Does SEM Work?

SEM (search engine marketing) identifies the right keywords to target through SEO and PPC to promote a business online to attract customers.

This is because, in PPC (often known as ‘pay per click’ or paid search advertising), a marketer will pay a small fee each time their ad is clicked; SEO is free but takes significantly longer to show effect.

Often, PPC pays for itself and, in some cases, your SEO efforts. PPC can drive instantaneous clicks to your website. If your campaign has been set up with the right audience in mind, this should lead to a large proportion of these clicks being MQLs (marketing-qualified leads).

Paid search ads work through a bidding auction and aim to appear for specific search terms chosen during the research stage. Although they look pretty similar to organic results, they have some critical unseen characteristics:

• A fee is paid for each time the ad is clicked.
• Search engines will mix and match your add headlines – 3 shown out of 15, e.g.
• The above is also relevant for meta descriptions where they will be mix and match – 1 out of 4 descriptions.

SEM and SEO are often muddled up as the same strategy! But, SEO is quite different as it focuses solely on organic growth. Through cleverly optimising webpages, blog posts and other online content, businesses can target the key terms their audience is searching for.  SEO is critical for businesses wanting to stay afloat – a study by BrightEdge analyzed various business websites and reported that over 53% of their overall website traffic came from organic search.

ROAR has experience utilising SEO to rank highly on SERPs. Using our specialist SEO skills we improved our online presence for the key term ‘SEO Management Service’.

We did this through a structured content strategy designed to spread SEO juice across multiple web pages on our site, pointing to one page that was optimised for ‘SEO Management Services’.

See the power of SEO firsthand. Request a free SEO audit from our team and uncover the hidden opportunities to improve your search engine rankings. Or, claim your free PPC ad review – or, even better, why not claim both?🤩

The Quickfire Benefits of SEM

Combining SEO and PPC through search engine marketing has a wealth of benefits:

• It can increase the opportunities for businesses to appear on SERPs
• Opportunity to further build brand authority and recognisability.
• It can result in more website traffic.
• More MQLs to your website.
• Increase in sales and conversation rate.

Our team of digital SEM specialists wrote a handy blog on the benefits of SEM, you can check it out here.