Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is a form of internet marketing that involves the use of paid advertising on search engine result pages.
There are four metrics that search engine marketing largely uses to optimize a website:
Keyword research
Analyzing your site’s most important keywords, is just part of the research of SEM. It’s also important to ensure your website is indexed under the correct keywords in all search engines, and also to use keywords in an efficient way to drive traffic and create conversion.
Website saturation and popularity
This is the analysis of how many of your site’s internal pages are indexed by search engines such as Google (saturation), and how many backlinks the site has (popularity).
Back end tools
There are all kinds of tools available for use on the back end of your website to analyze your traffic and SEM effectiveness. From traffic counting to page tagging, these tools can deliver valuable information to see what users are doing on your website.
Mobile Optimization
Ensuring your site is optimized for mobile use is an important part of securing mobile traffic, a major section of internet users.
While they share some similarities, SEO and SEM are two different fields of web optimization. SEM takes both paid search results (Google Adwords or Bing Ads), and organic search results into account. SEM also includes social media marketing and management. This not only focuses on directing social media traffic to your service or product, but also looking at the return on investment of your social media spending.
For best results, SEO and SEM are crucial to keeping your website at the top of relevant searches, and lets you find success in your industry.