Get searched for, get seen, and get to grips with SEM to increase your brand’s visibility.
Helping your business get noticed can be especially difficult in today’s market, when so many startups and businesses are launching all over the globe. In order to succeed, it’s imperative to capture an audiences’ attention, so the need to carve out a niche, focus on your USP and really separate yourself from the competition has never been more important. You can do all of those mentioned, but there is still the fact that you to get yourself seen by an audience, and convert their curiosity into clicking through to your website to find out more about YOU (well not down to the type of underwear you have on, or why you have an irrational fear of flying ants) but how and why your business can add value to their world.
In order to allow your business to generate some genuinely beneficial leads, you need to embrace a strategy to help you achieve this. The world of marketing has changed within the last 15 years. Television and print advertising have been joined by digital advertising, and seeing as there are millions of people using the internet every day, it’s now even more important to harness its power and reach.
The power of SEM
Search engine marketing (SEM) is now recognised as a crucial way to get your name in front of a prospective audience or buyer. Rather than employing SEO techniques such as keywords, backlinks and high-quality content to engage an audience, SEM actively promotes your website, increasing its visibility allowing it to convert this into potential visitors to your site.
It does this by putting your business on search engine result pages (SERPS) when people type in certain queries or phrases in search engines associated with your business. This is also known as pay per click advertising (PPC) because you bid on the keywords or search terms connected with your product in order for it to appear on the more important real estate of the search results. Depending on what your business offers, this could take the form of text based ads or product description ads – the latter takes the form of shopping ads, which are visual prompts and a more compelling way to engage with your potential audience.
Another benefit is that with SEM, you have a committed lead that actively wants to find out more about a service, business or product. They are receptive to new information and are in a mindset to engage with organisations or products like yours, so being within the first five or six results means you stand a greater chance of being clicked on. It’s also a non-intrusive way of interacting with customers, rather than being swiped past on social feeds as people get stuck on that meme of someone falling in a pool with their barbecue.
Just like SEO, you will still need to perform a certain amount of keyword research to see which terms have the most affinity with your business. There are various software tools you can use to bid on the kinds of keywords and related terms that are most applicable for your business. There are a lot of programs available from Google to help you such as its Keyword Planner and other guides to help you make the most of its paid search options with a costs and budgets option to help you keep track of your spending. As with many of Google’s products, it’s intuitive and a good place to become familiar with the technique.
Once you have mastered the basics, it’s worth checking out other SEM tools available such as BetterMetrics, Semrush and Hubspot that give you more in-depth control and campaign development options. Plus, even saying “Semrush” just has the cachet of sounding like you really know what you’re talking about.
Why SEM is important for tech startups
There are many advantages that tech startups have when using the SEM process. To start with, they are offering a service or product that is fairly unique, as opposed to selling televisions, laptops or running trainers. It stands to reason that the more niche your offering, the greater the chance that your service will appear higher in search rankings. A “creative design agency” search term may yield a plethora of companies, but a “branding services and content marketing agency for new UK technology startups” will push your business up the rankings.
Look at competitors’ sites to see which terms and keywords they’re using to appear in search results and bid on them too. Unlike the larger companies with bigger market shares and an established customer base to think of, startups have the flexibility to be agile, learn from and rectify their mistakes, and refine their strategies and campaigns and see the results tak effect with alacrity.
The benefit of using SEM campaign tools is that you can optimise search terms and keywords and see if conversion rates increase or not. Continually optimising in this way will help you convert leads into genuine customers. And who wouldn’t say “yes” to that?