Table of Contents

• What is Search Engine Marketing?
• Auction system in pay per click advertising
• How does an auction work?

In the previous notes, I mention about how to be found on search engine, and it is called SEO or search engine optimization. By conduction SEO steps, your business will be discovered in the organic result (it costs nothing to appear in the organic result).

What is Search Engine Marketing?

Now look at the right column or across the top of the page, these listings are paid advertisement. Your business can be shown here witch some costs. It is called search engine marketing (SEM).

Search engine marketing targets people who actively looking for product or service. This type of marketing is totally different from billboard ads, ad in magazine, TV. These types of ads are shown to a bunch of people, whether or not they are searching for the product or service.

The search engine marketing system is like this: people are looking for the things they want or things they interest, whereas advertisers target specific searches (keyword) and pay if someone clicks the ads. It is called as pay-per-click advertising (PPC ads).

Auction system in pay per click advertising

Search engine marketing is based on an auction system. Why? Because search engine limit the number of slots ads that can appear on an search engine result page (SERP). As a consequence, advertiser compete in an auction system for these slots.

How does an auction work?

- First, you must place a bid for the keyword you target.

- Then the system evaluate your ads whether your ads is relevant or not (quality score).

Keyword is the key in search engine marketing. There are three important things you must consider when pick a keyword. These are relevance, traffic, and competition.

Keyword relevance means the keyword should accurately describe your product or service (your business).

Once you think your keyword is closely describe your business, now consider about traffic. How many numbers people searching for that keyword. If there is no one search for this keyword, it is useless. In the reality, you should try (trial and error) to know which keyword is relevant and get plenty traffic.

For figuring out how many people search for the keyword, you can use keyword tool, such as: keyword planner.

After picking the keyword for search engine marketing, it's time to make your ads stand out in the search engine result page to catch searcher's eye. In order to catch searcher's eye, you should create compelling headlines and clear call-to-action. And the most important is offering anything unique.

See the samples of pay-per-click ads below:

Image Source: https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/6238019