What Is Search Engine Marketing?
Search engine marketing or SEM is a service wherein its provider will promote its clients’ websites on the web. Companies or individuals who perform or offer this service are called search engine marketers. Technically, search engine marketing is one of the many forms of internet marketing.
However, because of the numerous changes on the search engine and internet marketing industry, the meaning of search engine marketing slowly deviated from its original context. The change and the new definition will be discussed after a few paragraphs.
Search Engine Marketing History
Danny Sullivan coined the term ‘search engine marketing’. He is a key person in the search engine industry and informational websites related to SEM such as Search Engine Watch and Search Engine Land.
Search engine marketing started around mid-1990s. During that time, search engines are still on its early stages. Because of that, webmasters were having difficulty on being exposed to the growing numbers of internet users.
Search engine developers have seen that opportunity to earn. And to cover the operational costs of their free service, they have initiated search engine marketing in the form of pay per click. Around 2007, the internet marketing community has recognized the power of pay per click programs as the most profitable form of search engine marketing. Google AdWords serves as solid proof of that statement.
At the same time, search engine optimization slowly grew. By the way, search engine optimization is a process or methodology that is used to make a web site more visible on search engine result pages. The main concept behind search engine optimization is to make a website appear on the SERPs naturally or organically.
Internet Marketing
Together with it are social media marketing, email marketing, referral marketing, content marketing, and native advertising. Even if they are categorized differently from each other, search engine marketers usually provide those said forms of internet marketing.
The Two Biggest Search Engine Marketers
As of 2012, the two biggest players or vendors in search engine marketing are Google and Bing respectively. The main service they sell to provide search engine marketing to their customers is pay per click listing.
How Search Engine Marketers Provide Their Services
Fundamentally, search engine marketers use search engine optimization (SEO) to accomplish their tasks. However, search engine marketers are not limited in the usage of search engine optimization. Some utilize pay per click listings, while others utilize content generation. As long as their clients’ sites will appear on the first search engine results page (SERP), they will perform and use any web tactic or tool.
Pay Per Click and Search Engine Optimization
In contrast to pay per click, search engine optimization can be done without contracting or paying search engines to place websites as ads on the search engine results page. Instead, search engine optimization focus on developing a website to be more noticeable to search engines. It is done by coding websites in line with the guidelines of search engines, creating content that aims to be relevant to keywords (search words), and producing connections (backlinks) from and to authoritative websites.
The New Meaning of Search engine marketing
On a different note, search engine marketers themselves have a different interpretation of search engine marketing. For them, SEM is the process of buying ads from search engines to gain traffic. The main difference with the previous definition is that search engine optimization is removed from the equation. Marketers defined it to be similar with paid search marketing. Alternatively, some recognize SEM to be equivalent to pay per click (PPC) and/or cost per click (CPC) marketing since search engine ads are sold in those two forms.
Why Did the Definitions Evolve?
Even Danny Sullivan, who created the term ‘search engine marketing’, was unable to maintain its immaculate definition. Since many marketers referred SEM as paid traffic generation, its meaning changed. Due to that, the divide between SEO and SEM widen, and that separated them from each other. For the most part, that happened because of the listing types that search engines have.
Listing Types
Search engines have two distinct lists of search results links on its SERPs. The first set of links is categorized as unpaid, organic, natural, or editorial links or listings. This set of links is determined and calculated according to their relevancy of the websites they contain to the keyword the searcher has used. Fundamentally, search engine optimization plays a huge part in the generation of these listings. And it is safe to say that it can be manipulated or influenced by search engine optimizers.
On the other hand, the second set of links that search engines show is categorized as paid, pay per click, or cost per click links or listings. The only ones that will appear in this section or categories are the websites of the people or firms that paid for the search engines’ paid inclusion service.
Other Reason that Affected the Definition
Aside from the listing types, misinformation is to be blamed, according to Danny Sullivan. Search engine marketers are the biggest contributor of information on the World Wide Web. They are also the ones who write and advertise about this branch of internet marketing. Since most of them have different conceptions of the term, they have unleashed an unstoppable surge of misleading definition of search engine marketing. The perfect examples of this unfortunate string of events are search engine marketers who offer SEO and SEM services, which was supposedly wrong since SEO was under SEM.
Search Marketing
To prevent (or add) confusion, search engine marketers have come up with a better umbrella term to replace it. Now, SEM’s old definition is attributed to search marketing. Under search marketing are SEO and SEM. Aside from that, they have labeled SEO and SEM in terms of how they can generate traffic. SEO means free, while SEM means paid.
Last Words
Practically, those bunch of acronyms and terms together with search engine marketing can confuse almost everybody. With this article, you will determine which is which and what is what – hopefully.