What is SEM? How to plan for effective SEM

SEM (Search Engine Marketing) is a term that refers to Marketing on search engines. SEM consists of two different branches: SEO and SEA. This article XDIGI will introduce through these two branches of SEM and share with you how to plan or do SEM most effectively.

What is SEO?

My blog has a section dedicated to SEO and SEO tips, I won’t talk much about it here. This is a free fork in SEM and it is rated as extremely effective. Although the term SEM was born before SEO, it seems that a lot more people know about it than SEM or other branches of SEM. Businesses often invest a whole SEO team to bring their company’s website to high rankings on search engines without paying long-term fees. Many results show that SEO is better than SEA, another branch of SEM that I will talk about below.

What is SEA?

SEA (Search Engine Advertising) is a term talking about advertising on search engines. SEA is used mainly by large investment enterprises, and the value of SEA is often branded rather than sales or commercial. There are two popular advertising channels that are Google adwords (advertising on Google tools) and Microsoft Adcenter (advertising on Microsoft search engines like Bing). Actually, if you know how to analyze and optimize, you can still use SEA for small businesses with little budget.

How to plan for effective SEM

The SEM plan depends a lot on your campaign on the website. The SEM plan is divided into two phases: a short-term phase and a long-term phase.

Short term SEM period

At this stage you have to do well in two parts that are website and content. Your website must be designed with your target audience in mind. For example, your target audience is people over 30 years old, you must have an extremely minimalist website, easy to manipulate. You also have to have a lot of content so that users can easily find when they come to your website. It is important to note that your content must be SEO optimized from the very beginning. This part should only take you about a week to do. During the writing period you should also share on social networks to get the first visit to the website. Once you have a website and content, spend a little of your time choosing or writing a new article to introduce your company or service well, then do keyword research. You can use Google’s  keyword planner to analyze keywords, search volume, bids,… then make a list of keywords, compare them with the appropriate content. If you put a keyword in the wrong order, visitors will easily leave your website after clicking, which means you lose money without getting anything. Finally, do a few SEA campaigns to push your keywords to Google (here I’m only talking about Google ads, other channels don’t seem to be very effective due to low user density). book and the effectiveness of your advertising can be long or short. With SEA you can use both in the short term and long term, but a new website you should use SEA to increase the presence and visits to your website in 1-2 weeks before SEO.

Long-term SEM period

Although SEA is very effective, it cannot be sustained in the long term by funding and change. To maintain the long term you need to use SEO. However, a common mistake in companies is to take over Google search, by creating a system that includes many websites and SEO of those websites to compete for the majority of the search page. This inadvertently creates an internal competition and it is difficult to achieve high rankings because the website is not cared for carefully, the opportunity for competitors to easily surpass you. In short, the SEM plan is simply SEA first and SEO later. You can create an SEO team or look to SEO services to help you maintain a stronger website presence.