Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

This area is focused on paid marketing within search engines. If you are looking for the cheaper, but less accurate and predicable natural (organic) listings within search engines, then please go to our Search Engine Optimization (SEO) area.

In general, a truly successful website uses both organic SEO and paid SEM  for their overall internet marketing strategy. The PPC allows fast, focused and efficient marketing strategies, and Organic SEO allows you to get free traffic. Certain types of SEM also help your SEO campaign.

SEM Services

Pay Per Click (PPC) And Paid Placement Services

Most of the time, our clients want our multi-engine PPC services. This is bidding on keywords across several different search engines. It’s not unusual for the customers for a particular client to convert better depending on the search engine they come from. For example, users of MSN tend to be more consumer-focused, and more likely to buy home appliances, whereas users of Google tend to be more likely to buy a computer or iPod.

It’s hard to predict exactly where your best customers tend to come from ahead of time. Sometimes, you can find that you get a lot of visitors from one engine (at a high cost per click) but relatively fewer sales, whereas on another you may find that the cost per bid is lower and the visitors are more likely to purchase, even though there may be less of them overall.

 By using multiple search engines, we are able to take advantage of differing keyword bids and get the client the best result for their money. This also spreads the risk, since it’s highly unlikely that all of your major search engines will get hacked, or change their policies or be victims of click fraud, all at the same time.

Google PPC Management

It’s true. Except for China and Japan, Google rules for search. Many clients want to start off with just one search engine, and Google is often the best choice, holding 54% of the North American market.

We have Certified Google AdWords Professionals on staff that can help make your campaign reach its goals quickly and efficiently.

Bing PPC Management

Bing from Microsoft has a really nice way of segmenting your target audience, and doing keyword research. Many people find the Bing search actually results in more actual sales, though it’s also clear that this is not true for others – it’s definitely something you should try, though!

 

Second Tier PPC Management

Second-tier PPC refers to more specialized and smaller search engines, like SearchFeed, ABC Search, Search 123, Enhance, GenieKnows, Business.com, 7Search, and others. Although many of these PPC engines are honest and hardworking, click fraud is a significant issue here, with professional fraud artists/affiliates exploiting the engine relentlessly.

On the other hand, the traffic can be good and very inexpensive, if you know how to set it up and watch it properly. This is a very different area than Yahoo and Google, so you can’t just copy over your ads and keywords and expect to get results. We can help you capture the excellent potential of these engines, while advising you on which ones to avoid.

International SEM and PPC

There is a big difference between doing SEM in your own backyard, and doing it internationally. Keywords can’t just be translated, but rather they need to be properly researched. For example, the most common Chinese usage for the term “network” is different in Shanghai than it is in Hong Kong. Further, different search engines and portals are popular in different countries. For example, Yahoo is the most popular search in Japan, Baidu is the most popular in China, and Miva is very popular in Europe. We can help you choose the right ads, keywords, and search engines for your target market.

 Rich Media and Banner Advertising

Although everyone loves to hate banner ads, and they don’t work as well as they used to, you can still get some very good traffic from them. We can help you sort out the good deals from the bad ones.

Rich media advertising can be very effective, as it’s almost like a television commercial. These are often used as pop-ups or interstitial (between pages) advertising.