While established and reputable brands tend to dominate search results, search engine marketing (SEM) allows new sites a chance at visibility. SEM, while an investment, is a reliable way to spend your digital marketing dollars, especially when backed up by strong search engine optimization (SEO).

The primary benefit of SEM is that it generates traffic, but it’s worth understanding some lesser-known advantages to capitalize on this marketing strategy.

Why is search engine marketing important?

SEM refers to purchasing ads on search engine results pages (SERPs). These ads consist of a heading, body text, and URL, and they appear at the top and side of the page when a user searches for relevant keywords.

According to a study by Klarna Insights, 44% of purchasing experiences start on a search engine (primarily Google). That's more than physical stores (36%) and online stores (41%), making SEM ads an excellent use of marketing dollars. They're direct and consistent and put you front and center for a large audience.

SEM vs SEO

SEM is a pay-per-click (PPC) traffic generation method — you pay for each click the search ad sends to your site. Conversely, SEO doesn’t involve paying the search engine provider. Instead, it's about optimizing your site and content to perform well in search results. 

Despite their differences, SEM and SEO work together to generate more web traffic over time. SEM brings people in sooner so they can discover your SEO-tuned content. Then, as you gain more traffic from SEO, you can refine or scale down SEM, or use it to supplement your marketing channel mix.

5 advantages of SEM

There aren't many marketing methods as efficient as PPC. You only pay for ads that work, which can’t be said for billboards, podcast ads, or YouTube sponsorships. Paying per click can add up quickly, but your returns on that investment are impressive.

Here are five benefits you can expect from a successful SEM investment.

1. Instantly capture attention

Relying solely on SEO best practices to climb the SERP involves long-term planning and slow progress. It takes time to build up the reputation and authority needed to appear at the top. But SEM provides instant access to the most prominent places on the SERP so you can capture attention immediately.

2. Enhance brand visibility

SEM puts you front and center on the SERP when customers are already searching for relevant keywords. At that moment, they're primed to purchase, and you're the most visible option. Even if they don't choose you, they might remember your name for next time. Either way, your site gains brand awareness.

3. Leverage local advertisements

Google and Bing both offer the option to restrict your ad to specific geographic locations. With some ingenuity, you can use this to your advantage. For example, if you want to try an international marketing strategy, develop dedicated location pages for every region you want to reach. Then, run SEM ads in those regions that point to the relevant landing pages. This practice results in a localized experience that customers — and web crawlers — will appreciate.

4. Pinpoint your target audience

SEM ads target market segments like never before. By cleverly selecting keywords, you can pinpoint your target audiences and serve each a different ad experience.

For example, a task management company might create separate ads for freelancers and business clients. Freelancer ads would target phrases like “affordable task tracker,” while business ads could target “enterprise project management tool.”

5. Value for effort

The ads themselves don't take much effort to create — they're a simple text block and URL. You’ll spend some time perfecting the landing page the URL leads to, but all in all, minimal effort goes into each SEM ad. In exchange for that effort, you get a reliable advertising platform that only charges you when it works.

How to conduct an effective SEM strategy

With SEM, you and your competitors bid on ad spaces to decide which ads appear on the SERP. This ad auction happens automatically every time a user makes a relevant search. To participate in the auction, select a "maximum bid," which defines how much you're comfortable paying each time an auction happens. If your bid is accepted, your ad's quality score determines where it appears on the page. 

A strong SEM strategy uses smart keyword bidding and quality ad content to generate appreciable results. Here's what you need to know about both.

Keyword bidding

Selecting the right keywords to bid on requires significant target audience knowledge. When customers search for keywords like "shopping" and "buy," they're indicating a very different intent than those searching for "research" and "studies." That intent is a primary indicator Google and Bing use to determine who participates in the ad auction. As you might imagine, bids for keywords related to a purchase come at a high cost, but they could be worth it under the right circumstances.

For example, if you purchase an ad for "buy Apple watch band," your bid will likely be accepted over those who only bid on the words "Apple watch band" — even if they set a higher maximum bid — because your keyword combination was more relevant to the user's intent.

Check Google Trends to find the right keywords, finding synonyms and adjacent phrases that might also be worth a bid. Then, perform Google searches with those phrases to view competitor ads. Determine what's working for them and learn from their mistakes. You can also use tools like Semrush and Ahrefs to find applicable keywords.

Quality score

Even if your ad wins the auction, it still isn't guaranteed a top spot. A handful of ads win every auction, and they're sorted into ad spaces based on quality. 

Bing and Google Ads use a combination of factors to determine your quality score, and they show this score on your ad listing. The main factors that impact your quality score are your ad’s relevance, its expected click-through rate, and the quality of the landing page it links to. You must optimize all three to earn the best score.

Elevate your digital presence with Webflow

Search engine marketing requires using strategic keywords, audience-relevant ad copy, and an effective landing page to bring in traffic. And Webflow enables you to build and launch landing pages and campaigns at scale.

Webflow is a visual-first web development platform for marketers, editors, and designers alike. Build, manage, and optimize your landing pages and track your performance — all within a visual canvas that’s backed by enterprise-grade hosting, scalability, and security.