Introduction to search engine marketing (SEM) 2022

(SEM)

Hi, I’m Pawan Kumar from Blogbuzz and I’m excited to talk to you about Google AdWords specifically search ads so:- 

what is search engine marketing?

Search engine marketing is the form of internet marketing that involves the promotion of websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results pages like Google through pay-per-click advertising and why is search engine marketing so important nearly half of digital marketing budgets are spent on search with 31% on paid search and 18% on SEO and with search engines Google likes to provide the best experience to its users.

When we’re looking at the results the search page may look different for different users so for example I live in Duluth Minnesota which means we are more than likely going to have a very long winter with a lot of snow so I searched winter boots here’s an example of what a search results page may look like the top three search results are paid search ads below them are organic ads and then to the right you’ll see shopping ads which is another type of ad Google AdWords provides well what if I know I want a certain type of brand I’ll type in Ely mukluks they just are a couple hours north of Duluth.

You’ll see that the first result is a paid search ad the low is organic search results also related to the company and then you’ll notice to the right-hand side is their Google my business and this shows all of the business information really necessary for me to get in contact with them or drive up to their store if I was really eager to buy myself some mukluks and we’ll talk about Google my business later on.

The next day we are expecting a really really big snowstorm and I need to find some winter boots right now so I type into Google shoe store near me and as you can see you’ll only find local results here on the search results page because Google is assuming that I am looking to purchase or make the decision to buy winter boots in the very near future and you can see I click through to their website if I want to learn more about them or I can get directions straight to their store if I am ready to buy so let’s build a search campaign you’ll see here this is the basic structure of what any Google AdWords campaign might look like you’ll start by building your Google AdWords account and this is where you’ll create your email password and then you can also load in your billing information next you’ll have your campaign.

Where when you create a campaign you can allocate your budget to the locations and languages that you’d like to target if you want to be on specific networks in the search or display if you want to add any ad extensions and then you can also set certain end dates for your campaign to automatically start or end whenever you would like after you have your campaign established then you’ll create ad groups and ad groups are segmenting your business or your website by topic so say you’re a shoe store and you want to promote your winter boots your running shoes and your sandals for those looking for a winter getaway all three of those would be their own ad group and within each ad group.

You’ll have ads and keywords and this is an example of what an ad could look like just a general ad and it has a few ad extensions also included in it so it gives you a good idea of what your ad could look like but not all ads look like this and then you’ll have your keywords and we’ll get more into keyword research later but these are the words or phrases that people may use to search to find your business and the ones that you want to bid on so let’s break down a search ad.

So here’s one example of a search ad we have the headline and then right after the – we have part of the description copy that sometimes comes up next to the headline below that we have our display URL and below that we have a rating which is a public rating that previous customers can use to rate your business based on their experience after that we have another line of description copy and this is where you can add the keywords that you want to appear for your users after a description copy you have call-outs which are just statements they don’t link anywhere and the 24/7 customer support is a great example of something that you may want to add to your ad.

And the next we have a review extension which is your ability to take reviews that are located on other websites and add them per Google’s approval to your ads which gives your users and external credibility of your brand and then at the very bottom we have site links which are links to other pages on your website so say this ad is about winter boots but you don’t know if it’s someone looking specifically for winter boots or maybe they’re looking for clearance items or maybe they’re looking for brand new items and you’re able to leave them to that page rather than sending them to your website and having them navigate through your website next.

We have keywords so that’s when we do a lot of keyword research and this is usually the first thing that we do whenever a client comes to us looking for a new AdWords campaign first we like to start by building our list based on conversations with our client knowing their product service and Industry so on this screen we have winter boots that are our focus for this campaign when we’re doing our research we’ll think about other variations of winter boots so say snow boots after we have that list established then we will think about the customer so maybe they’re specifically looking for waterproof snow boots or women’s snow boots or snow boots on clearance and we’re able to generate a pretty good list just by those two sources and then we’ll usually send a list to our client because they are at the end of the day of the subject matter experts.

They’ll be able to prioritize the keywords that we send them based on their knowledge and conversations with their customers and after we have this list established we can plug them in with our ad groups and get our campaign set up to run another tool we like to use is keyword planner and this is in Google Adwords so for this example you can plug in your targeting information on the left-hand side and I’m only focusing on winter boots here in the centre of the screen you can see that the trends for winter boots spikes in November in December.

So this can give us an idea of when we should be promoting these products based on the search history of 12 months in our targeting locations, it also tells you if your competition is low or high and what a suggested bid is so based on your budget you are able to do the math and guesstimate how many clicks you could potentially get per day so after we get the campaign set up and running we like to measure and we keep a really good eye on how our campaigns are performing making optimizations as needed to make sure it’s constantly improving throughout the duration of the campaign.

So here’s just an example of what some of the key metrics are within the Google AdWords platform goes from left to right we have clicks which are the number of times people have clicked on your ad then we have impressions which is the number of times people have seen your ad and then we have click-through rate which is the number of clicks divided by impression so how many people who saw your ad actually clicked through next we have an average cost per click which gauges the cost per click on average and with the average cost per click and click-through rate we are able to benchmark it with other industry trends.

So we are being able to understand if our campaigns are in the line above or below and make optimizations based on those numbers in the next column we have conversions which conversion can be anything from a phone call to purchase sometimes it’s just playing a video on the landing page so we’re able to track whatever is the client’s goals and then the final column we have an average position which can tell us where the ads are on average landing in search results so like the examples previously there was one case where there were three ads and then there was one case where there was only one ad and sometimes no ads show up because of the local searches show instead of them.

So if you’re in the top three that’s really good otherwise you may be landing on the second or third page of Google search results and most people don’t even make it there so what about local search 50% of consumers who conduct the local search on their smartphone visited a store within a day and what do I mean by local search when I did the search earlier for shoe stores near me it showed me stores that were near me based on my location preferences

So here’s another example of a Google my business which will appear when someone does a local search as well on the right-hand side you can see all of the company information you can see photos you can sometimes even take a tour of inside the office and people are also able to lead public reviews so you’re able to get a really good idea of what this business is all about before you even walk into the door and if you aren’t sure if you have a Google my business already just go to gym o comm slash business and Google will walk you through the steps to make sure that you’re all set up and verified on Google my business and all of your information is up-to-date so to conclude search engine marketing is very important because nearly half of the digital marketing budgets are spent on search with 31% on paid search and 18% on SEO.

Thanks for joining me today if you would like to learn how Blogbuzzs can help you with your AdWords campaign feel free to contact us we’d love to help. Also, You can check Search engine marketing consultant.