Step 6
SEM
1. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) / Paid search
Google Adwords is Google’s SEM advertising platform.
With SEM, advertisers target specific keywords, and only pay when someone clicks on their ad. It’s a Pay-Per-Click, or PPC, advertising model.
Unlike traditional marketing, which broadcasts a message to the world at large, SEM targets people who are actively looking for your products and services.
1. The SEM auction
Search engines limit the number of slots adverts can appear in on an individual page. Advertisers then compete in an auction for those slots. After you do a search, you will see the outcome of an auction. The adverts that win appear near the top. The runners up appear in lower slots.
So how does the auction work?
Like most auctions, you place a bid. But it’s not all about your bid, the relevance of your page to the keyword is crucial too. To be successful in the auction you need a competitive bid and high relevance.
You set your bid, which is the max amount you will pay for a click. If you bid $2, and the rest of the competitors bid less than $1, you’ll have a higher bid, meaning you’ll be ahead in the auction. Keep in mind that businesses can change their bid at any time.
Remember though, the other big factor is relevance. This is a measure, normally rated from 1 to 10, of how closely your ad relates to what the person searched for. This is also known as your quality score.
For example, if someone searches for “wedding photography”, and your ad’s headline is Wedding Photography in Cardiff, the search engine probably considers your ad highly relevant. That means you’d likely get a high quality score.
But what if your advert’s headline is Wedding Services Cardiff? Both adverts refer to weddings, but this one is less relevant, because it’s talking about wedding services instead of wedding photography. In this case, your relevance wouldn’t be as good, so you’d probably have a lower quality score.
Think of it this way, when two competing businesses have equal bid prices, the business with a higher quality score will appear higher on the SERP.
One of the best ways to improve your SEM Ad Rank is to make sure your headline and description match the keywords you’re targeting.
The Ad Rank is calculated by multiplying the bid with the quality score. The ads are shown on a SERP in descending order of Ad Rank.
Try searching for a handful of keywords relevant to your website. What do you notice about the advertisers for these keywords? Which ads appear at the top of the page? Which ads appear lower? Can you see a correlation between relevance and ad position? Take note.
2. What makes a good keyword
- Relevance to your website – be specific and long tailed
- Traffic potential – search volume
- Competition – if a keyword is relevant and has high traffic, there’s a good chance that a lot of your competition is bidding on it. The goal is to find keywords with high relevance, high traffic potential, and low competition
Google’s Keyword Planner tool, which is available in their Adwords platform, is a useful tool for determining the relevance, traffic, and competition of keywords. It can also suggest other keywords you may not have thought of.
3. Make your ads stand out
SERPS contain a lot of text. There are ads and also lots of organic search results, all competing for your attention. So how can you make your ad “jump off the page?”
There are a few simple guidelines you can follow to turn a plain advert into something attention grabbing:
- Relevance is the name of the game in SEM. Try and write your advert’s headline to match the keyword you’re targeting as closely as possible.
- Have a strong call to action so the searcher knows what to do after the click on your ad
- Like “View our wedding photo gallery”
- The copy-writing of the text should sound catchy and confident
- Also, make your advert look interesting by using compelling word choices, word capitalization, and separator selection (Punctuation)
- Find a few adverts that you really like, then copy what they did.
4. Relevance
Relevance is not just based on your Advert text. Google also looks at your landing page to see how relevant it is to the keyword.
5. Structure of SEM campaigns
Think of your SEM plan as an upside-down tree.
- At the top is your account, which you create with Google Adwords, Bing Ads, or another search engine
- Within the account there can be multiple campaigns
- Each campaign controls important decision like the daily budget, the targeted audience, and which advertising networks you use (like search and banner ads)
- Within each campaign, you can create multiple ad groups. Each ad group contains a set of targeted keywords and the ad that goes with them.
For example, let’s say you’re a photographer, and you specialize in various types of photography, let’s say weddings, baby photos, and family portraits.
Each of these specialities contain different products, so you decide to split them into separate campaigns. Within each campaign, your next move is to create ad groups for each type of product. For example, within your wedding photographer campaign, you might create ad groups for engagement photos, bridal portraits, candid wedding photos, and more.
You can have one ad group for baby photos and add the keyword ‘baby photos’.
Note:
- You can create different add groups for different features you want to advertise
5. Keyword search tools
In Google keyword planner, if you type in a keyword, they will show which keywords are most relevant and useful for your campaign.
And they will show you related keywords that people search for. The results also show you the search volume for each keyword, and other useful information like suggested bid prices and competition levels.
The keyword planner tool also allows you to enter negative keywords in an ad group, so your ads don’t show up if unrelated terms appear in the users search term. When you enter your keyword, you will see a list of related keywords which may give you some ideas of which negative keywords to use in your ad group.
5. Fine-tune with keyword match types
Broad match (default)
- Using a broad match, your ad will appear the most often for a broad range of search terms. This will run through your budget very quickly.
- With broad match, Google might also show your ads when people search for other terms, terms you didn’t specifically choose.
- That’s because search engines can show your ads when people search for variations of your keywords. This isn’t always a bad thing.
Phrase match
- To change broad match to phrase, surround your keyword in double quotes
- Phrase match tells the search engine not to show your add unless the search term contains your exact phrase, and possibly more terms before or after the phrase
Exact match
- To change broad match to exact match, surround your keyboard with brackets
- Your ad will only appear when your exact keyword is searched for. If there are other terms in the search query, your ad won’t appear. However plurals of your keyword may still show your ad.
If you narrow your keyword targeting with phrase or exact match search, you will notice a decrease in traffic, but the quality of the traffic should increase.
Broad match is usually the best option because everyone structures their search queries differently, so if you narrow your keyword targeting with phrase or exact match, you may be missing out on users who are indeed looking for a product like yours, but entered their search query differently than how you phrased your targeted keyword.
5. How to know what is and isn’t working
Say you want to track conversions. You need to set up Google Analytics and create a conversion tracking code. Say you want to track purchases, place the tracking code on the confirmation page. You need to place conversion tracking codes on pages people see after to complete the conversion.
With conversion tracking, you can see how many people visiting your site from a search ad end up completing a purchase, or other conversion.
SEM is a learning process. You need to constantly review what adverts are pulling in new users and focus your energy and budget on those ones.
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