Search Engine Marketing, or SEM, is a digital marketing strategy which marketers use to increase a website’s visibility on search engine results pages. This uses paid advertising to get a website ranked in the top spots in search engine results.
When creating an SEM campaign, it is good to have an agency experienced in SEM Management in Melbourne or other areas, because they will need to work on the following tasks:
- Conduct extensive keyword research.
- Select the relevant geographical locations for the ad to be displayed.
- Create ad copy.
- Bid on the price they are willing to pay for each click on their ad.
SEM is a very essential part of the digital marketing strategy for businesses, with so many people using the internet to search for the goods and services they want. It is very effective and cost-efficient. SEM campaigns create ads that are targeted to an audience that is actively interested in buying a product or service and therefore are highly relevant to the business. These are people who are somewhere in the middle of their buying decision.
Many experts in SEM Management in Melbourne and elsewhere, predict huge changes in trends for SEM strategy in the coming year. These include:
- User experience over quality content – It seems like many platforms will base the return that a business gets from a PPC campaign on the user’s post-click experience on a website, rather than their pre-click experience. With so many user complaints of websites that are slow to load, or difficult to navigate, users have had a negative experience when they click on an ad and are linked to a website. Campaigns of the future may require more customised landing pages, as well as other user experience aspects.
- Voice search – There are predictions that voice search will be one of the dominating methods as time goes, and text searches will phase out altogether after some time.
- Internet of Things (IoT) – There are predictions that smartphones and devices will soon give way to other devices through IoT, such as smart speakers, digital home assistants, and headphones.
- Advertising on YouTube – Latest changes to YouTube advertising options will make it a well-used platform by marketers, especially with Google’s new metrics that improve optimization for YouTube.
- Non Google SEM – At the moment Google is one of the most used advertising platforms in digital marketing. However, experts in SEM Management in Melbourne and elsewhere, predict that this will change with marketers using many other platforms for paid advertising. For example, Amazon.
- Use of cookies – Online ads usually rely on Cookies that keep a track of the websites a person visits etc, however with so much emphasis being laid on privacy issues these days, some companies have announced future restrictions on cookies and will be blocking tracking cookies on their websites in future. Cookies are used greatly for remarketing campaigns, and this new trend will certainly be a huge impact on remarketing efforts for businesses, specifically those who rely on remarketing ads.
SEM tactics are a very important part of digital marketing, and although there will be huge changes in the future in terms of methods and technologies, it will still remain a vital element in a business’s digital marketing strategy. Many experts in SEM Management in Melbourne and elsewhere predict that the future of SEM will be more of a customer-centric approach, rather than an ad spend strategy, as will privacy take a giant leap forward together with more responsive ads.
Of course, these are predictions made based on latest news and development made by the giants in the business such as Google, Facebook etc, however no one will really know how things may progress in the coming months and years. As many people and businesses saw in 2020, the times are very unpredictable and there is no sure-fire way of knowing how things will move ahead for businesses or for economies as a whole.
However, the only constant will be that technology will keep evolving and with it, businesses will look at more and better ways of promoting their products and brands to their customers, which will cost less and give them better results. Isn’t that what is important for a business at the end of the day?
