An Introduction to Search Engine Marketing

Search Engine Marketing, or SEM, is one of the most practical and effective ways to grow your business in an increasingly competitive marketplace. There are different types of Search Engine Marketing, including PPC (Pay-Per-Click), SEO (Search-Engine Optimisation) and Display Advertising.

PPC is one of the key approaches we take to drive results for our clients. This is an online advertising model where we place ads on a search engine such as Google and pay when someone clicks on one of them. According to Social Media Today, there’s over 7 million advertisers that use PPC, a number that is only likely to grow considering that there are 3.5 billion global searches per day on Google alone. 

We build and manage these ads through the Google Ads platform, which is driven primarily by auction-style bidding. Bidding on relevant search terms, in synchrony with relevant ad copy and landing pages, leads to a better chance of your ads being highly ranked within the search engine. As an element of the media mix, this approach is important to increase your online presence, allowing you to appear on terms your customers are actually searching for. Compared to traditional forms of advertising, which involve an untargeted “mass media” approach, this method enables larger audience segmentation. It also allows us to change and adapt ad messaging fast.

Automation within search platforms has become an increasing trend, which we aim to capitalise on as an agency. Google is stopping the creation of expanded text ads after 30 June 2022 and prioritising responsive search ads. An expanded text ad gives you more control over how your ad appears, advertisers can pick and choose which text assets to place in the headlines and descriptions. The maximum number of headlines in the expanded ad set up is 3, whereas a responsive search ads maximum is 15!  With responsive search ads, Google will automatically test different combinations of headlines and body copy – offered up by the advertiser – and learn which combinations perform the best. Google’s algorithm means you’ll now need less time to test your ad copies. Additionally, your ads will show up in more searches, driving more clicks to your site. This is just one of many steps Google is taking towards an automated machine learning approach, keeping up-to-date with changes from the major paid advertising platforms helps us maximise our clients potential.

Voice searches are also a growing trend in 2022 too. These are more question based, and so we need to make sure our clients are the first ones to answer them when a search is made. The growing presence of these terms places more importance on the earlier parts of the marketing funnel. We always need to understand which stage we’re targeting the customer at: awareness, consideration, conversion or retention. This trend will also involve targeting more keywords that begin with “hey google” or “ok google” and pose questions in a more natural tone. People rarely ask a question the same way speaking as when typing.

At AUK, our approach to search engine marketing varies from client to client. Our med-tech clients have different objectives from our other clients. They are B2B (business-to-business) organisations which means they are more focused on sign ups to webinars, white papers and case studies. On the other hand, we have clients that are D2C (direct-to-consumer), where the focus is getting the products off the shelf. We work closely to define our clients’ goals, so that our proposed strategies address all elements of the funnel, from awareness, consideration, conversion and retention.

We view PPC as an integral part of increasing our clients’ online visibility and helping them reach their target audiences. 

Find out more about how AgencyUK can support your company’s goals by getting in touch with us today.

hello@agencyuk.com
+44 (0)1225 429 938