The Role of SEM for Your Business
Hey, What’s up beautiful people. Welcome to another “Roy’s 2 mins sharing”
You may hear people talking about the power of SEM. Need traffics, search ads~ wanna generate leads, search ads~. Lots of people consider SEM as omnipotent medicine. It is not, unfortunately. I am considering search ads as a channel similar to social media, blog post, Amazon. The essential marketing principle is finding an efficient way to reach out targeting potential customers.
Back to the topic, what is the role-playing of SEM in a typical company?
As the last post mentioned, SEO is an efficient way to reach out your targeting audience for free. When we considering paid ads, it will be a different story because we have to take the expenses into account. BTW, if you haven’t read my last blog, please take a look. I am sure you will have a better understanding of the role-playing of SEO.
The conclusion of the SEM: SEM is a way to target keywords which are important to your business but hard to get a good spot on the search result page (underlined and bold).
Two questions came out from the above statement:
- Important keywords? What does that?
- How hard it is called “hard”?
A.Important keywords? What does that?
There are three main types of keywords sharing in the industry.
- Informational keywords: help people to find general information
- Navigational keywords: help people to find a specific brand, product, or service
- Transactional keywords: help people to find a place to make a transaction or exchange
For informational keywords, the best way to target such keywords is through SEO. People go to your site for getting useful information while they are not likely to make any transactions on your site. In this case, it is not a good idea to do paid ads for this type of keywords because your ROI would always be negative.
This might happen…
Your boss or client: where the money goes?
Your answer: See! We got so many traffics. Yeah!
Your boss or client: WHERE DID YOU SPEND MY F MONEY!
You: Hum..Traffics?
Your boss or client: Grab your shit and get out!
You: Wait..wut..
One thing is interesting which I just realized when I started learning digital marketing. My professor said: what does paid ads could do? One: traffics. Two: brand awareness. Three: transaction. This is why he is a university, not a businessman or a business owner. If he owns a company, I promise to you all; his answer would be the transaction.
For Navigational keywords, people are searching for a specific brand product. Changing people’s mind is tough. Also, Google will remind you that your ads have been restricted because of trademark policy. If you are lucky, your ads are not restricted by Google, but the ads probably will only be shown on the second page or even worse because the quality score will be extremely low. You can try such type of keywords and see if using these kinds of keywords would help your business, if not, just shut the ads.
So the most important keywords to your business are transactional keywords. Such keywords used as search query indicate that the searchers are pretty much at the end of the funnel. In other words, they are pretty much ready to buy something. The rest of the works have been taken over by your website, your landing page, your offer or the product. The search ads have finished their job which is delivering the right people to your site.
B. How hard it is called “hard”?
There are some keywords which are really hard to target, I list a couple below, if you have any other options, please leave them in the comments.
- YouTube Videos Dominated Keywords
- Featured Snippet
- Big brand Dominated Keywords
- Amazon Dominated Keywords
1.YouTube Videos Dominated Keywords 2. Featured Snippet
These two types of keywords are used to be showing on the search result page for informational keywords such as “how to…..” YouTube videos and featured snippets are so annoying when you are doing SEO, but for SEM, you definitely won’t use informational keywords as I mentioned above.
3. Big Brand Dominated Keywords
If some keywords are critical to your business while your competitor’s website pages have been entirely populated on the first page. At the same time, you cannot beat them through SEO in a short period. In this case, using search ads to get a good position is an excellent idea because you can get the first position by your hard working such as a making a user-friendly landing page, a couple of eye-catching ads copies, etc.
4. Amazon Dominated Keywords
Sometime, transactional keywords will lead to a search result page which is entirely filled with Amazon. It is bad news.
If you take a close look, you probably could conclude a couple things.
- Same brand products are sold by different Amazon sellers.
- Price game is useful for such products.
Unless you have a well-known brand, targeting such keywords would be be tough. You can always have a try but when you realize that the performance of ads is not going well, don’t be anxious. It is a common thing for me.
Anyway, as I said, you can have a try for doing paid ads for this kind of keywords. At least, you can get top 3 positions on the search result page with your hard working. Maybe you would have a well-performed campaign. One thing you gonna remember is evaluating keywords by applying ROI instead of other metrics. If nothing is working, the final solution would be starting to expand your distribution channel and try affiliate marketing.
Continued…
I guess I throw up a lot of information in this blog because I want to you all could have a full picture for the points I mentioned above.
Same as usual, if you like this blog, don’t forget to share, comment, like!! If you have any questions, feel free to comment below, I’d love to chat with you.
In the end, Happy New!
Hoping everyone would be a billionaire in the next year.