Search engine marketing (SEM) is a term that’s been around and recognized equally with SEO. Some companies choose to create in house teams while some other outsource it to agencies who also provide them auxiliary services like SEO and social media marketing. Whatever you choose, here is why SEM is important and why you include it in your business strategy, irrespective of your business size

# 1 – Improve brand awareness

With SEM, people searching for products or services related to what you offer to get to see your ads listed on top of results. Now, ads can receive clicks and make people more aware of your brand, which they may not otherwise have known about. In the event that they do not click the ads, searchers will still see them and can recognize the brand name or URL. If your search shows up along a competitor brand, even better. Now, imagine a new business doing this by themselves without SEM. The challenge would be far greater. SEM can give your brand the immediate visibility it needs.

# 2 – Improve conversions and revenue

Paid ads not only create an impression but clicks that can drive people to your product or service website. While SEO drives organic results and better rating on search engine pages naturally, SEM gives you the results faster. This brings you on top to a highly targeted audience. When you have a qualified lead and a good website in place, the chances of conversion are much higher. Thus, sales start improving once you implement a good SEM strategy. The technique can be applied not just to selling, but also when you want your customers to take a specific action like signing up for your newsletter, tiring out a beta version of your product, or participating in a contest.

# 3 – Better local marketing

Search engine marketing works beautifully well in targeting not just people all over the globe, but in specific localities or communities as well. When your business is a restaurant or salon that caters to a specific location, your interests obviously are in attracting more local crowd than advertising to a larger audience outside. When implemented well, search engine marketing in China can bring up your business in results for searches like “restaurants near me” or “ladies hair stylist near me”. In cases when you need to advertise to a specific country, like China, it also becomes important to use tools and search engine pages that allow those potential customers to be reached. Baidu SEM is a perfect example of this.

# 4 – Works for even small budgets

Typically, paid advertising eats into your marketing budgets. However, SEM is cost-effective. When done right, this method can give you very good results, including a good return on investments. The most common choice for SEM is the pay per click (PPC) model, where you are charged for your ad only when a person clicks the link to your website. Also, in most cases, you can work on search engine marketing with shoestring budgets. This makes it an ideal choice for smaller ventures that may not have deep pockets to market or advertise their brand to consumers. It also works for companies that need to spread their budget across multiple locations.

Not to mention how flexible SEM can be. When you see an ad doing exceptionally well, you can pump in more money, or add more keywords to target more people. On the contrary, if something doesn’t work, you can choose to end it any time you want.

# 5 – Gives you a competitive advantage

Sometimes it is difficult to surpass the top spot that competitors occupy in organic search results. This may be because you are relatively new or because you need a lot more SEO efforts to bring your page on top of the search rankings. However, with PPC you can get a top spot for yourself, alongside the competitor. Also, if they fail to use SEM to its full potential, chances are that you can get a sweeter spot on the search engine results page than them and make more conversions easily.

When done right, search engine marketing can give you a wealth of data about your consumers, and their behavior. This data can then be used later for other marketing efforts at a later point in time, or to fine-tune your efforts when necessary.