Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

Search engine marketing (SEM), or paid search, refers to the use of paid placement or contextual advertising to improve a website's visibility in search engine returns.

In South Africa, Google reigns supreme, so an SEM campaign will usually involve bidding for keywords in the Google AdWords programme. These will be the phrases you believe your customers will use when searching for the product or service you sell.

Paid placement adverts are typically displayed on the right side of the SERP alongside the organic results. Each time an advert is clicked on, the advertiser will pay a fee. Contextual adverts normally run on third party websites as part of Google's AdSense programme and can be paid for on a pay-per-click basis or on a cost-per-impression model.

In search circles there are endless debates as to whether organic SEO or SEM works best. This rather misses the point as the two often work best when run in tandem

A company embarking on an organic SEO programme for the first time will have to wait a few months for its organic effort to deliver decent placings, so a PPC campaign can drive quick traffic and achieve visibility. Similarly, with organic SEO becoming an increasingly competitive business, it may be unrealistic for a company to anticipate a top 3 organic listing on a highly contested phrase. In this instance, the regular SEO activity may be better deployed to target less competitive long-tail search queries, with the AdWords programme focusing on more popular head terms.

We like to practice what we preach, so as well as offering organic SEO and broader SEM campaigns to our clients we also use them ourselves. For example, we target the longtail phrase SEO company Cape Town in our organic search activity and the head term SEO in our GoogleAds campaign.

Our Google AdWords qualified SEM consultants would be delighted to advise you on how to how to reach online audiences in South Africa, so do drop us a mail or give us a call.