Search Engine Marketing

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is a powerful way to drive qualified traffic to your website. It can be particularly useful to get a new website listed on the search engine results pages before its pages are fully indexed by the search engine but it also has an important part to play for mature websites.

Google AdWords and its associated AdSense products are probably the best known and most used forms of SEM. Microsoft and Yahoo also have their own products (AdCenter and Yahoo Search Marketing, respectively); however, the two companies formed a partnership in 2010 and both products are now run through Microsoft AdCenter.

The ads are normally displayed in specific areas of the search engine results page and are identified as ‘sponsored ads’ or just ‘ads’.

Google AdWords
Google AdWords consists of creating short, three-line adverts (or ‘creatives’) featuring a product or service supplied by your website using keywords that relate to that product or service and specifying a maximum price you are prepared to pay to Google if someone clicks on the ad to visit your website. Hence the alternative name of “pay-per-click” (PPC). A fourth line in the ad contains a link to your website.

As with their natural or organic listings, the relative positions in which ads are displayed are subject to an unpublished algorithm. It is not simply based on ‘who pays most gets listed highest’; the ad’s click-through-rate (CTR) for example is a factor. An ad offering to pay up to £1 per click that has a high click-through-rate will usually be positioned higher than one offering to pay £10 but that is only rarely clicked. Google are in this for the money, after all. It is estimated that up to 97% of Google’s income (over $9 billion in the second quarter of 2011) comes from these clicks!

The advertiser has a large degree of control over where and how the ads appear, including days of the week and time of day, geographically by country, region or radius, various visitor demographics, etc. Although a fundamentally simple idea, an AdWords campaign can be complex to set up and optimise for a maximum return on your investment.

Google AdSense
Google AdSense is a partner product to AdWords and uses the same four-line creatives. The main difference is that where with AdWords the ad appears on the search engine results page, with AdSense the ad appears on third party websites, and if clicked a proportion of the cost per click is paid by Google to the third party website owner.

Both the advertiser and the third party website owner can control what types of ad appear on what types of website. The advertiser may want his ads displayed only on websites offering the same or complementary products or services; the third party website owner may not want to display ads that are in direct competition with his or her products or services.

Silkweaver’s Search Engine Marketing Services
We offer three basic SEM services:

• We set up and manage your AdWord campaign,
• We set up your AdWord campaign for you to manage yourself, and
• You set up your AdWord campaign and we manage it for you.

Although we do not specify a mandatory period and you may cancel or suspend your AdWord campaign at any time, we strongly recommend that it runs for a minimum of three months. For this reason our set up charges are spread over three months and are payable monthly in advance. Our management charges are charged monthly in arrears.

Don’t Make a Costly Mistake, Let Us Set Up and Manage Your AdWords Campaign