SEARCH ENGINE
SEARCH ENGINE
MARKETING _SEM
SEARCH ENGINE
OPTIMIZATION _SEO
Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Or Social Media Marketing (SMM)
Or Social Media Marketing (SMM)
Who is deciding whether you should use search engine marketing (SEM) or social media marketing (SMM)? It’s not me or you, but customers behaviour to decide where you should do your marketing. Let’s put ourselves in customers’ shoes. If I am looking for professional services like auditing, I would search for auditing on Google when I need this service. If an auditing firm promotes their services on Facebook at 24/7, I still would not call them up as most of the time, i don’t have a need. However, if an electronic company is launching a whole new products which haven’t existed in the market, customers would never know what to search on Google because they don’t even know it exists. So Facebook is a channel for you to proactively spread the news to potential customers.
By answering the questions below, you may have an idea whether search engine marketing (SEM) or social media marketing (SMM) suit your business more.
- Are your services or products for B2B only?
- Are your services or products having a specific need for a group of people?
- Do people know the existence of your industry?
* If all the answers are yes, then search engine marketing (SEM) is a good fit to promote your business.
Is Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Just About Pay Search?
Search engine marketing (SEM) is not just about pay search. Most large search engines offer display advertisements. For example, Google offers Google display network (GDN). Google has rented a lot of advertisement space from different popular websites. Most of the display advertisement you see in Asia websites are actually provided by Google. Generally speaking, display advertisements can be used in two aspects. The first usage is to acquire new customers by targeting users interest. Those interests are based on the search engine database. The second usage is for remarketing. Once a user has performed an action on your website and recorded, related display advertisement will be shown to that user in where ever he browse.
How To Analyse Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Performance?
To analyse search engine marketing (SEM) performance, there are two simple data you have to check, which are the bounce rate and duration per session. If you are using Google ad, then the data are shown on Google analytics campaign section (Acquisition > Google Ads > Campaigns). For a well-performed search engine marketing (SEM) campaign, bounce rate should not be too large compared to organic search bounce rate. And duration per session should not be too low compared to organic search.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Vs Digital Marketing
SEO is a long-term investment compare to digital marketing. Digital marketing helps you to gain exposure immediately whereas SEO takes time to get your site ranked up on the first page of search engine. So why SEO now? Once your website is well configured with SEO requirement, your increasing slope will be much higher than your competitors which means that in some time, your money spend on acquiring customers will be lower than your competitors.
Do You Need Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
Why don’t you do an online testing for your website now? There are a few online SEO checking tools recommended, such as SEO SiteCheckup, SEO Tester Online and Neilpatel. If you achieve a score over 80 then your website is pretty much well configured for SEO on the technical site. Maybe you should focus on the non-technical part of SEO like keywords density, content, backlinks, etc.
Check Your SEO Score →
How To Check SEO Performance?
To know your website performance, you would need to use two tools, Google Analytics and Google Search Console. They are free but very powerful.
Google Analytics
allows you to check data of your traffics, such as the ratio between organic search (SEO) and paid search, bounce rate between the two channels, etc. However, it could not show you what keywords converted from organic search (SEO) due to policy changed a few years ago. Therefore, we would use Google Search Console in parallel for the SEO performance analysing.
Google Search Console
allows you to focus on organic search (SEO) traffic. It helps you to identify your keywords ranking on Google as well as their click rate. Google search console is not limited to keywords report only, it also helps you to check the technical configuration of your website. If your website get errors or penalized, reports will be given by Google Search Console.
