Search Engine Marketing

Search Engine Marketing, also known as SEM, is the broad term that encompasses all efforts with regard to achieving leads and sales from the search engines. PPC Management, SEO, and landing page optimization all generally fall under the umbrella of Search Engine Marketing, though the phrase is used quite liberally and in a variety of contexts. For example, QuickList is the most affordable of Wpromote's suite of Search Engine Marketing offerings while our full-service PPC Management is a much more comprehensive type of SEM service.

The principal goal of Search Engine Marketing is to help promote websites on the Internet by increasing their visibility in the search engine results pages. Many people try to capitalize on the Internet's marketing potential with attention-grabbing pop-ups and banner ads. Unfortunately, these ads fail to attract even a fraction of the people who see them. Search Engine Marketing, on the other hand, offers a more reputable and effective marketing strategy for online businesses. In fact, in the past year, SEM has grown much faster than traditional advertising with over $9.4 billion spent on Search Engine Marketing among North American advertisers in 2006 alone.

The purpose of search engines is to help people find what they are looking for quickly. Google is currently the most widely used search engine on the Web with over 50% of the market share, while Yahoo! is the second most popular search engine with a market share of 23.6%. Search engines have proven to be the most effective way of attracting quality traffic, since people will often simply use a Google search to find a product or service that they need. By positioning your website in a carefully targeted column of search engine results, SEM ensures that the people who see your ad are people looking for your type of business. SEM therefore aims to drive targeted traffic to your site.

Some companies that specialize in SEM promise a set number of clicks or hits; these are usually based on a huge mark-up on a cost-per-click basis. For exact rankings, either in the organic or sponsored links, no ethical firm should ever make specific promises to this sort of positioning ("top 10 rankings," etc), because there is just no way to make such a blanket guarantee. When they do, there is usually a catch, like guaranteeing ranking for your most specific term on one of the smaller search engines. The bottom line is that you should judge your search engine marketing results on just that: your results. Sales, leads and phone calls are what matter, not hit numbers or rankings. It is for this reason that Wpromote's QuickList program does not promise any set number of clicks, but instead, focuses on effectively creating and managing your site's sponsored links via AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing to achieve the best results possible for your site.