Search Engine Marketing: Meaning, Types, Advantages and Disadvantages

Search engine marketing is one of the important marketing strategies for your business.

Understanding the use of search engine marketing will certainly maximize your marketing efforts.

In addition, by properly managing your brand's search engine marketing will also help your business grow well.

Not only good for business growth, search engine marketing or commonly called SEM has also proven to be optimal for increasing consumers.

What is search engine marketing and what are its advantages and disadvantages? Let's discuss it in more detail through the article below!

Definition of Search Engine Marketing

Quoted from Moz, search engine marketing is a strategy in digital marketing that is carried out to increase visibility on search engine results pages (SERPs) using paid advertising.

Simply put, search engine marketing is a marketing strategy to make your business site the top on the main page of search engines.

Even though you have maximized your organic marketing strategy, you will still need paid advertising with this SEM strategy. When talking about organic marketing, of course what is used is SEO or search engine optimization.

Quoting HubSpot, a survey shows that 49% of potential consumers use the Google search engine to find new products, so optimizing search engine marketing is crucial.

The thing to note in search engine marketing is that in its implementation it needs to be done step by step with a trial period.

Not all marketing problems can be solved by using paid advertising. Don't let this become a waste of budget and ineffective.

Types of Search Engine Marketing

Many sources say that search engine marketing is a type of paid marketing only.

However, there are also several sources that state that search engine marketing is a combination of organic and paid marketing.

There is nothing wrong with the two definitions above, to better understand it, here are the types or types of search engine marketing:

1. Pay-Per-Click Ads or PPC

As previously explained, paid advertising will provide more benefits and targets for your site.

If you do a search on Google, the site that appears first above the organic search results is a site that uses paid advertising.

This is the essence of paid advertising, not only to get results from SEO but from paying for ads to be the top search results.

The most commonly used model in paid advertising is Pay-Per-Click where you have to pay only when someone clicks on the ad. The most commonly used PPC platform is Google Ads.

How much you have to pay for one click on Google Ads depends on many factors. Google will determine how much the cost per click or cost per click of the ad is.

The cost per click and the position of your paid ad compared to other paid ads will also depend on the supply and demand or demand and supply of your product.

2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO or search engine optimization is also part of search engine marketing.

If PPC uses paid ads as a marketing tool, then SEO is the process of optimizing your business site using specific keywords.

The principle of SEO itself is to create good and optimal content to increase user understanding while becoming brand awareness.

There are three types of SEO, namely technical SEO, On-page SEO, and Off-page SEO.

Through SEO, you can get a lot of traffic coming into your site even without using paid advertising.

SEO content will appear right below paid content and is usually considered more reliable and accurate because the content is targeted or adjusted to the target you want to achieve.

3. Local SEO

Local SEO is part of SEO in general, but it is also part of search engine marketing because it involves special techniques to increase visibility from search results.

Usually, local businesses that want to get new consumers or attract customers will use local SEO compared to other types of search engine marketing.

Not only is it more affordable, local SEO can also attract new site visitors and prospects for business.

Examples of local SEO can be found when searching on Google. For example, if you search with the keyword "Dental Clinic in Malang" then the list of addresses that appear at the top of the search page is called local SEO.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Search Engine Marketing

Search engine marketing can be used for almost all types of brands. However, it is also necessary to pay attention to the following advantages and disadvantages:

Advantages of SEM

Search engine marketing is very easy to measure its success. Moreover, there are currently many tools used to measure the performance of SEM.

You can easily review and perform the strategies that have been implemented so that the budget and investment used can also be more effective.

Not only that, you also do real-time monitoring if you use paid advertising on search engine marketing. Evaluation and changes to strategies can be done quickly.

The use of strategies such as pay-per-click can also control the daily budget and how much investment is needed to be more effective.

However, from the advantages mentioned above, the main advantage of search engine marketing is that the results are seen faster, the process is efficient, and in accordance with the target.

Disadvantages of SEM

One of the main disadvantages of search engine marketing is the use of paid marketing which may cost more.

This is because paid advertising will be more optimal for the campaign that your brand is doing.

Not only that, competition in search engine marketing will be more and more difficult so that other strategies are needed to keep your brand having high supply and demand.

Paid advertising is sometimes also considered annoying so that many people still choose content from organic SEO results because it is considered more reliable.

Those are the things you need to understand about search engine marketing to optimize your marketing strategy.

Marketing strategies, especially in digital marketing, are crucial for almost all types of businesses today.

That is why it is important to understand digital marketing strategies and how to implement them in your business.

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