Why Search Engine Marketing Remains Vital For Online Business Growth

Although the heady days of only using SEO are long over, promoting your brand via search engines is still a highly viable method for attracting new customers into your fold. These days, SEO alone isn’t enough to compete with the enormous amount of competition from both real businesses and new technology advancements like AI. 

But the good news is that, combining some of the old ways with more modern techniques, a la search engine marketing, you can dramatically increase visibility and hopefully convert this visibility into real, paying customers who stick with your brand for the long term. We are discussing what SEM is and why you really need to add it as part of your overall digital marketing set of tools if you’re serious about boosting revenue and keeping the customers flocking to your website and other digital assets.

The Changing Topography Doesn’t Kill SEM—It Reinforces It

Let’s begin with the elephant in the room, which happens to be everyone’s favorite bubble…AI. We can’t really discuss anything related to online search without first tackling this subject. While it’s true that AI has eaten into many a webmaster’s portfolios, which is really horrible because plenty of very high-quality sites tend to get caught up in the dragnet, which is Google’s attempt to adapt to AI competition, the reality is that by using the correct and time-tested techniques, you can actually benefit from what’s happening. Part of the trick is selecting an Honest SEM agency that understands this point and can acclimate to modern methods. According to one such agency, Searchbloom, it’s possible to use conventional data points and combine them with AI to enhance your output to generate genuine results that move the revenue needle…not just increase vanity metrics. 

With SEM, you will utilize traditional SEO practices with things like paid advertising on platforms that align with your audience’s preferences. This might be creating a PPC campaign with Meta to utilize their multi-platform offerings like Facebook and Instagram to reach a millennial audience, or playing for ads on TikTok if your business happens to fit within the demographic that uses that video service. The beautiful thing about SEM in particular is that it aims to cover all bases, including conventional search to capture organic traffic, so in reality, you are capturing as many internet users as possible within the parameters you set vis-à-vis targeting, etc.

Core Benefits of SEM for Online Business Growth

There are numerous advantages for option to adopting SEM into your digital marketing mix, and all of which should result in increased results for your bottom line.

Unmatched Intent & Conversion Rates

Conversion is really the name of the game in this industry. It’s easy to fall into the trap of watching your analytics and seeing how users increase over time, but if you’re not converting these users, it’s kind of all for naught. Generally speaking, with a well-thought-out campaign that uses real data, you can expect to achieve the following results from advertising:

Multiple sources, including: WordStream, Webapex

As you can see, some options will yield far superior results than others (including the OG marketing channel that is email!). But when combined based on your research of how your target demographics interact with the internet, you will discover truly incredible outcomes. 

Immediate Visibility and Measurable Results

In many ways, the holy grail of traffic is high-intent organic traffic. This is (kind of) free, and with the right inputs, you can receive very targeted traffic to your website or application that reaches far out into the future. The primary issue with relying on SEO by itself (aside from the SERPs being eaten alive by AI overviews) is that it takes a long time to gain any traction, if at all. SEM is a more rounded approach that allows you to see almost immediate results and then tweak them until you reach a critical mass where your sales are outpacing your investments. 

Ability to Target High-Intent Customers

Advertising enables you to make use of some truly remarkable targeting features provided by the likes of Alphabet, Meta, and TikTok, et al. Whatever you think about their approach to consumer data privacy, it can’t be denied that the tools they offer those willing to pay for them allow you to reach the exact people you want to target, and who are most likely to make a purchase. This reduces your overall costs and boosts revenue.

Highly Scalable Customer Acquisition

SEM as a method is highly scalable. You can turn on and off the spigot at will (although not necessarily advisable). This is beneficial if you are sunsetting a certain product and replacing it with a newer option. You can turn off the old campaign and turn on a new one designed around your latest offerings. This is obviously not exactly how it works, but the point is that you can scale up as much as you desire, and as long as you have the product to sell, the money to invest, and the right campaign under your feet, you will see your turnover increase exponentially. 

AI Search (SGE/AIO) Actually Makes SEM More Important

Believe it or not, traditional SEO techniques, combined with more modern SEM ones, can help AI engines to parse your data properly and deliver very specific results to those using them. This might sound a bit like you’re giving your data to the all-encompassing AI to steal, but if you fail to adapt to reality, you will get left behind. Instead, you need to look at AI as just another channel to approach your target market and use to promote your brand. 

SEM isn’t a new approach to digital marketing, but it is one that you ought to seriously consider if you’re to meet the contemporary ways that people use the web. As long as you can create a watertight campaign or hire an agency to do so on your behalf, you will quickly discover just how powerful it can be.