What Is Search Engine Marketing? The Simple Guide

Search engine marketing (SEM) is a type of digital marketing that utilizes search engines like Google to get more traffic to a website.

There are two ways to do SEM. You can pay for ads to show up in the search engine’s paid results or optimize your pages to show up in organic results. And you can do bothtoo.

That said, there’s some debate about whether SEM includes both types of results or paid only. It’s roughly a 50/50 split, as you can see in ourpoll:

To keep things simple in this guide, we will focus on paid search advertising in Google.

And if you want to learn about SEO too, check out our SEO guide for beginners.

Search engine marketing on Google allows businesses to reach a large audience actively looking for products, services, or information.

• 68% of online experiences begin with a search engine (source).
• Google is the biggest search engine, with over 92% of the market share (source).

And when compared to other marketing tactics, the benefits of SEM are quite notable:

• One of the quickest ways to drive traffic – You can turn on ads in minutes, and they’ll start showing up in Google.
• Relevant traffic – You get to choose the keywords and some other targeting options. For instance, if you’re a plumber in London, you can literally pay to be there when people type “plumber in london” into Google.
• Easy to measure – If your ads drive more revenue for your business than they cost, you’re making money.
• Easy to scale –...