What is SEM?

Wednesday, December 16th, 2015

Search Engine Marketing is the process of acquiring targeted traffic by buying ad listings on search engines. It is sometimes called PPC marketing or CPC marketing. It is a quick and fast way to rank your website for keywords you want to target. With SEO, it may take you a few months or a year to rank up your website on the first page for a keyword, but with SEM you can create your ad and it will be live within a few minutes. Usually, advertisers only have to pay when they receive a click. This is called PPC/CPC or Pay-Per-Click/Cost-Per-Click advertising. Google Adwords is the largest PPC advertising network. Adwords uses a ranking system called Ad Rank that decides which ads will hold the first position, the second position and so forth. There are many factors that make up the Ad Rank. It’s not just about who bids the highest but it also involves your expected click-through rate, landing page experience, ad relevancy, easy site navigation, transparency, ad formats and more. For more information on Adwords Auction, watch this video: