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Search engine marketing is a digital marketing tactic that uses paid advertisements on search engines to increase product or brand visibility.
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With billions of daily users (and searches), it’s critical for your business to be visible on search engines like Google. But it can be challenging to organically rank in the top search results—especially for newly launched businesses and websites.
This is where search engine marketing (SEM) comes in.
SEM can get your website immediate visibility, attract potential customers, and drive sales. This guide provides you with fundamental knowledge and actionable insights to help you succeed with SEM campaigns and achieve your marketing goals.
Search engine marketing is a digital marketing strategy aimed at improving a website’s visibility in search engines through paid advertising. The goal is to appear in the paid results when people search for terms related to your business, product, or service.
Let’s say you sell sports gear online and want to drive sales of tennis shoes. These are the two main ways you can reach potential customers on search engines:
Like this:
The results in the green box are paid ads, and the results below are organic. SEM allows you to advertise your brand in the paid results space.
Search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimization (SEO) both aim to increase a website’s visibility in search engines.
While the aim of SEM is clear, experts are divided on its scope. Some believe SEM includes both paid and organic search, while others relate it strictly to paid search.
For instance, Ishaan Shakunt, founder of Spear Growth, a performance marketing and SEO agency, believes SEM includes both organic and paid strategies.
“SEO is not the name of the channel; the channel is organic search,” Ishaan says. “SEO is the activity we do to improve organic search. Similarly, PPC is not the channel; paid search is the channel. PPC is just one way to bid on a lot of ad channels, including those outside of paid search.
“So, search engine marketing should be a combination of paid and organic search. These two teams should work closely together because it’s the same search engine, just two different ways to show up on it.”
On the other hand, for Kamel Ben Yacoub, founder and CEO at Getuplead, a PPC agency, SEM mainly relates to paid search.
“In my opinion, SEM clearly refers to paid search, while organic has its own term: SEO,” Kamel says. “Twelve years ago when I started working in digital marketing there wasn’t any confusion!”
Here’s a quick overview of the differences between SEO and SEM:
The key difference between SEM and SEO is SEM focuses on paid ads to drive traffic, while SEO involves optimizing a website to increase organic search traffic.
SEM can instantly show your ads, since you are paying for placement on the Google search results page. SEO, on the other hand, can take a few months (or years) before your website shows up in top organic search results. It takes time to build website authority and improve rankings.
SEM results are tied to the ad budget and campaign duration. Once you stop paying for the ads, the traffic stops. But SEO can continue to drive traffic for years after the initial effort.
You need both SEO and SEM for a comprehensive digital marketing strategy. While SEM can quickly drive traffic and conversions, SEO builds a strong foundation for long-term online visibility and authority.
SEM, or paid search, increases your online presence and drives targeted traffic to your website. Here are several reasons why SEM is important:
Here’s an overview of the key components and processes that work together to create effective ad campaigns:
Before you can run your ads, you need to set up your Google Ads account and campaigns. This typically involves:
Learn more about setting up a Google Ads account campaign.
Google Ads uses keywords to match your ad with users’ queries when they search for products, services, or information related to your business.
If the query contains a specific keyword that you’ve bid for, it will trigger your ad on the search engine results page (SERP).
It would look something like this:
You can choose from the below three keyword match types:
While your ads can get maximum impressions by choosing the broad match type, you should be careful with it to avoid spending on irrelevant keywords, says Riley Adams, founder & CEO of WealthUp:
“Google will bid on lots (and lots) or truly irrelevant keywords if you aren’t careful,” he says. “Make sure you keep a tight rein on your negative keywords if you opt for “broad” match keyword bidding. You’d hate to bid on worthless keywords just for the sake of driving impressions and clicks.”
So make sure to add “Negative Keywords”—queries that you don’t want to show your ads for.
For instance, you can add “free tennis shoes” or “cheap tennis shoes” as negative keywords to prevent showing your ads for such queries.
Read more: Keyword Research for Ecommerce: A Beginner’s Guide
When a search query includes keywords that are part of an ad campaign, the search engine runs a real-time auction to determine which ads appear and in what order.
However, the highest bidder doesn’t necessarily win the auction and ad space.
For instance, Google Ads also considers your ad’s Quality Score, rank thresholds, context, and other settings like geographic targeting, in addition to the bidding amount. It mainly uses these factors to calculate an ad’s Quality Score:
The higher your ad Quality Score, the lower you’ll pay for each click.
As a result, much of the job of an advertiser is to achieve a high Quality Score (and low cost-per-click) on their high-intent keywords by creating compelling ad copy and landing pages that match the keywords.
If you win an ad auction, your ad will show up within the paid search results section of the SERP. It’s usually marked as “Ad” or “Sponsored.” Your ad placement (how high it appears) depends on your Ad Rank compared to other bidders.
Google Ads bills you for the total number of clicks for your ad. That’s why this advertising model is called pay-per-click (PPC) marketing.
Once your ad campaigns are live, you need to track their performance. Monitor key performance metrics like click-through rate (CTR), conversion rate, cost-per-conversion, and return on ad spend (ROAS).
Based on this data, you can optimize your campaigns to improve their performance. This can involve making adjustments like revising bids, ad copies, or target keywords.
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How well you understand your audience significantly impacts the results of your marketing campaigns—be it organic or paid channels.
So, in-depth audience research is the first and most crucial building block to creating highly targeted and relevant ad campaigns that convert.
According to Radulescu Stefan Valentin, paid ads manager at Irresistible Me, a Shopify store, audience analysis is much more than just knowing their demographics.
“Knowing your audience goes beyond age or location,” he says. “It’s about understanding what they like, their habits, and what they search for online. Use these insights to tailor your ads.”
So consider diving deeper into:
You can find such data from tools like Google Analytics, Semrush, and SparkToro.
You can even go a step further to get better insights into your audience. Combine the above findings with your own research. It includes reaching out to your existing customers through surveys, interviews, or focus groups. Talking to them directly is one of the most effective ways to understand your audience.
“Approaches to target audience research will vary by industry but one constant is that your existing customers are the best research tool available to you,” says Dean Rowe, director of paid search at Shopify, about audience analysis. “Speak with them, join sales and customer support calls, and genuinely learn what their motivations are and what is most important to them. For example, your ads may be highlighting price when quality and reliability may be a larger motivator.”
Once you gather all the data, create detailed buyer personas that include demographic, behavioral, psychographic, and socioeconomic data. Use these personas to guide your paid search strategies and campaigns.
A typical buyer persona can look like this.
Download Shopify’s buyer persona template
Having a simple, well-organized Google Ads account helps you show relevant ads to the right audience. It is also easier to manage, track, and optimize as required.
To start with, create tightly themed ad groups and campaigns. It includes bundling related ads together with related keywords into an ad group. So, when people type a search query that includes your target keyword, your closely related ads show up.
“A well-structured account mirrors your website structure, thus making it easier to manage and optimize ads,” says Will Yang, head of growth and marketing at Instrumentl. “It facilitates better performance tracking and gives a clear picture of budget allocation.”
For instance, if you sell electronics online, this is what a simplified Google Ads account and campaign structure could look like for your business.
Long-tail keywords are more specific and often indicate higher purchase intent. For example, keywords like “best tennis shoes for narrow feet size 10” or “coupon code for asics tennis shoes” indicate specificity and higher buying intent compared to the query “tennis shoes.”
“Precise keyword selection is the most basic but the most important part of anything SEM,” says Matt Calik, CEO at Delante, an SEO and SEM agency. “Identify high-intent keywords in the specific industry. Don’t go for words you think make sense, but actually check what potential customers use when they are close to making a purchase decision. Don’t let your intuition fool you here.
“I recommend using Google Keyword Planner for insights if you don’t have much experience in this field. You can use it to check search volumes and competition.”
Google Keyword Planner is a free-to-use keyword research tool, available to anyone with a Google Ads account.
You can use the Keyword Planner to:
Refer to this guide to learn more about using the Google Keyword Planner effectively.
Also, note that high commercial intent keywords often have a high cost-per-click (CPC). This can increase your customer acquisition costs. This can be a challenge, especially for small businesses.
However, Sarah Atkinson, a PPC consultant at Sarah Atkinson PPC Consultant advises experimenting with alternative keywords having the same intent as your target keyword to reduce CPC.
“Testing new keyword variations can help to reduce cost per click,” she says. “It’s likely that competitors are also bidding on the same keywords so that can increase the cost. Regularly looking into alternatives that competitors may not be targeting can help you to increase traffic and conversions at a lower cost.”
Similarly, Kamel suggests bidding for product use cases as keywords instead of product categories to lower your CPC and maintain profitability.
“Focus on product’s jobs-to-be-done keywords instead of category keywords,” she says. “These keywords are the jobs that people want to do. In general, they have lower CPC. For example: ‘How to screen record with sound’ is a job-to-be-done keyword. The product category version would be ‘Video maker tool.’”
By being a little creative and scrappy, you can keep your PPC costs in check and target high-intent keywords at the same time.
A higher ad Quality Score can lead to better ad placements and lower CPC. Therefore, having a high ad Quality Score should be one of the top priorities (or key performance indicators) for your SEM campaigns.
“A Quality Score of 8+ is very good, but all paid search practitioners should aim for 10/10,” Dean adds. “This requires a logical account structure, with strong relevancy of keywords throughout the targeting, ads, and landing pages.”
You can increase your ad Quality Score by improving:
“The best tactic for achieving this is ‘walking the store,’” Dean adds. “Every week carve out time to review low-quality score keywords and go end to end through the flow from the search engine results page through to the landing page. Most often the fixes required are obvious to see.”
PPC keyword research is as much about knowing which keywords to avoid as it is about finding the right ones to target. So, make sure to build a list of keywords for which you don’t want to show your ads. These are called negative keywords.
In addition to saving you from spending on irrelevant searches, it also helps you improve the relevance of your SEM campaigns, says Brittany Serrano, VP & head of paid media at Sosemo, an SEO, SEM, and social media agency.
“Add negative keywords to filter out irrelevant searches and improve ad targeting,” she says. “By excluding irrelevant keywords, you can increase ad relevance and Quality Score while reducing wasted ad spend on irrelevant clicks.”
For example, if you’re selling only premium brands of tennis shoes, you can add “cheap” or “low budget” as negative keywords. This way, your ad won’t show up when a budget-conscious buyer enters a search query such as “cheap tennis shoes.”
This helps you:
Successful SEM campaigns are built around users’ search intent. So, ensure your target keywords, ad copies, and landing pages are aligned with search intent.
To start with, get answers to these two important questions:
A simple way to find these answers is by mapping a customer’s typical buying journey, says Ishaan.
“Draw out the natural buying journey of your audience, i.e., the journey they follow when solving this problem without you in their lives,” he says. “Now, you should also be able to find the different search terms they search for in each stage. Make sure to align the messaging with the intent at that stage of the buying journey.”
For example, a search query “top tennis coaches in new york” indicates a vague probability a searcher might eventually buy tennis shoes if they start learning the sport. But the main intent here is to find a coach, not buy shoes.
Whereas, the search term “best tennis shoes for clay courts” indicates the searcher is much closer to making a purchase, because of the specificity of their search. It triggers these ads:
Here, the searcher is more likely to click through the “Asics” or “Tennis Express” ads because they are more aligned to the search query.
To be specific, the “Asics” ad has an image showing tennis shoes in action on a clay court, and the “Tennis Express” ad’s headline “Clay Court Tennis Shoes” is hyper relevant.
Marketers often get this part wrong, says Casey Meraz, founder of Juris Digital, a specialized marketing agency for law firms. “When it comes to ad copy and landing page optimization, an often overlooked aspect is the message match. Your ad copy should seamlessly connect to your landing page content. Any disconnect could lead to lower conversion rates and a higher bounce rate.”
So, ensure there’s alignment between search intent, ad copy, and landing page. Alignment will improve user experience and conversion rates.
You need to keep close tabs on your Google Ads budget to get the most out of your ad campaigns. Consider allocating your budget based on the performance of your keywords and ad groups.
“It’s important to set realistic budgets based on your advertising goals and expected ROI,” Brittany says. “I’ve found it helpful to start with conservative budgets and adjust them as I gather more data and optimize my campaigns.”
If you’re just starting with SEM, it’s best to start with a conservative ad budget and improvise your strategy based on performance data.
“It’s important to be nimble and let the performance guide budget decisions,” Brittany adds. “Being fluid between tactics and engines drives day-to-day and long-term performance success.”
SEM requires constant testing and optimization just like any other marketing campaign. So, keep experimenting with Google Ads strategies and campaigns, analyzing performance data, and making adjustments to improve your results.
Here’s what you can do:
Increase your ad conversions with Shopify Audiences: Target high-intent buyers with custom search ads based on behavior, store data, and products. Boost retargeting conversions and slash customer acquisition costs with powerful buyer insights.
Explore Shopify Audiences
These two factors help you understand if SEM is right for your business:
Your Quality Score determines how much you pay per click. A good score depends on ad copy that resonates with your target searchers.
To be successful with SEM, you need to understand who your market is (product-market fit) and what resonates with them (message-market fit). If you haven’t accurately determined this, Google may assign you a low Quality Score, meaning you will be charged more for ads, and it will be difficult to succeed.
Learn more about finding your product-market fit:
SEM relies on high-intent searches, which means people need to be searching for your type of product or service.
If you sell tennis shoes, that’s no problem—in the US, there are more than 90,000 searches for “tennis shoes” every month.
If your product is creating a new category, such as a hybrid tennis shoe/cozy slipper, people aren’t yet searching for it, so it will be much more difficult to determine specific keywords to target.
You can create category awareness through other types of marketing, then run search engine marketing campaigns once the market is more aware of your product.
Search engine marketing is one of the most powerful types of advertising—there’s a reason advertisers spent $237.86 billion on Google ads in 2023.
Be it organic or paid search, Google has always prioritized the user experience above everything else. So, the simplest key to succeeding with SEM is to ensure your ads and landing pages are perfectly aligned with your audience’s search intent.
That being said, follow the above tips and insights to create SEM campaigns that drive sales and return on investment.
You can measure the success of your SEM campaigns by tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) like click-through rate (CTR), conversion rate, cost per click (CPC), ad Quality Score, and return on ad spend (ROAS). You can get this data from Google Ads reports and Google Analytics.
Google Ads, Google Keyword Planner, Semrush, and WordStream are some of the most popular SEM tools.
One of the main drawbacks of SEM is that the PPC traffic stops as soon as you pause your ads, unlike SEO, which can provide long-term traffic without ongoing costs. Other disadvantages include high CPC (for competitive industries and keywords) and the possibility that search users may avoid clicking on ads.
Search engine marketing is a blanket term that refers to increasing your visibility in search engines. Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is a specific type of paid advertising where you pay each time someone clicks on your ad. In short, PPC is a type of SEM.
An example of SEM would be the ads (marked as “Sponsored”) you see above the organic search results when you type a specific query into Google.
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