Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is a fairly new method of Internet advertising that involves the aid of paid placement or Pay Per Click (PPC) programs supplied by large search engine companies such as Google, Yahoo and Bing (MSN). If you are not familiar with how PPC works, it is very simple: a company (say Google for example) hosts your business ads for you and charges you only for clicks that your ads generate. For example, say you have an online store that sells bicycle parts and you have one ad running on Google’s AdWords PPC system. That ad shows up during a customer’s search query in the Google search engine and for one reason or another the customer clicks on your ad (to be redirected to your online website). When that customer reaches your website (by clicking on the ad) you are charged a small amount for that click. (This amount is set by you and can vary from as little as $0.01 to as high as $40.00 and beyond). There is not upper limit as to how much you are able to spend for your clicks, but most skilled SEM professionals can keep that cost very minimal while gaining a excellent exposure and click through rate. Keep in mind that Google’s AdWords system is somewhat based on the idea of an auction: the person with the highest bid gets his or her ad displayed first and above all others. Although your initial bid for your ad plays a tremendous role in how often and where your ad will be displayed, there are a multitude of other factors that Google looks at before deciding where and when to display your ad. In fact – the formula is so complex that no one really knows exactly what it is and how it is calculated. All we know is that it is based on your keyword relevance, your site’s relevance, your ad score, some other internal Google factors and your PPC bid. With that said, hiring an experienced SEM consultant will save you copious amount of time and money which would not be wasted trying to figure out what is the best combination of the many factors producing the greatest returns for your business.


Sergey Gorbatov
Principal Consultant, Sell With SEM
info@sellwithsem.com