Search Engine Marketing (SEM) refers to all of the steps used by an internet marketing professional to increase the traffic that comes to a website from search engines.

There are two primary tasks of SEM. The first is increasing a website’s search engine visibility. Search engine visibility refers to the position of your site in the results listed by a search engine when a user types in the keywords for which he or she is seeking information. For example, if your company sells unicycles, your goal is to increase your site’s search engine visibility for search terms related to unicycles. Ideally, anytime someone types the word “unicycle” into the search box on Google, your website would be the first one listed on the search engine results page. Anything you do to increase the chances that your website would be listed first falls under the category of search engine visibility.

The second primary task is to turn visitors to your website into customers. This means that in the process of SEM, you’re targeting internet users whom you already know to be interested in what you have to offer. Even if your search engine rankings are not as high as those of your competitors, you can still outperform your stiffest competition if you convert visitors into customers at a higher rate than the other guy.

SEM can be approached in two different ways. The first is Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and the second is Pay-Per-Click (PPC). It’s no secret that using PPC is the quickest and easiest way to complete SEM, but internet marketing specialists will almost always recommend the more tedious and time-consuming method of SEO. The reason is this: SEO gives you organic results. This means that your search engine ranking is natural rather than the result of “paying” for your search engine position. Organic results are not only free, but they are longer-lasting. The problem with using only PPC marketing is that your results go away once you stop paying for them. It is possibly to find the ideal balance between SEO and PPC, but SEO will always be the safest way to increase your search engine rankings.

There are three tools used in SEM. SEO, as mentioned above, seeks to optimize your website’s HTML code so that a search engine robot looking at your page will recognize that your website’s content is highly-relevant to the keywords that searchers will use to find your products or services online. It also seeks to increase the number of relevant links to your page as search engines use inbound links to determine a website’s search engine ranking.
Bid management seeks to control the amount you spend keeping your website visible in a search engine’s sponsored listings. Ideally, you should use organic means to increase your traffic, but should also recognize when paid advertising is necessary to keep your traffic high.

Web analytics are all the tools you use to obtain, analyze, and use the information you get about your visitors, how they found you, and what they did when they find you. This information can be invaluable once you learn how to use it to your advantage.
In summary, the two primary tasks of SEM are to increase your website’s visibility and to convert visitors into customers by targeting the audience to whom you market your goods and services.
The two ways of approaching SEM are organics SEO and PPC. The ideal is to find the balance between both.

Finally, the three tools used in SEM are SEO, bid management, and web analytics.