Search Engine Marketing: Advantages and Disadvantages

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Previously we’ve introduced what Search Engine Marketing is. We’ve talked about the definition, compared it to SEO, and explained the benefits for small businesses. Now, let’s have a more in-depth talk about it. 

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is characterised by the set of tools, methods, and techniques that offer assistance to optimise the visibility of websites and web pages through search engines. In brief, the benefit of Search Engine Marketing is to gain better search engine positioning on Google and other search engine sites.

SEM can assist you to increase the visibility of your website in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Investing in it, is a wise way to grow your brand awareness and increase sales. The most used SEM platform is Google Ads, but there are other platforms such as Bing Ads.

Why use Search Engine Marketing?

SEM has its own value for your business. Generating organic traffic to your website is a long process and can only be seen as the result in the long term. The benefit of SEM is that it allows you to bring qualified traffic by attracting users’ attention. It also generates clicks by allowing users to filter based on the words they seek.

Without a doubt, the benefit of SEM could be a capable tool for nearly all sorts of brands. To assess when and how to utilise it, let’s see a few of the advantages and disadvantages of Search Engine Marketing.

Advantages of Search Engine Marketing

Now let’s talk about the advantages of SEM. Search Engine Marketing tools such as Google Ads and Bing Ads allow you to see detailed reports of your campaign, so you can know what’s happening with your ads. To have everything controlled and perfect you can integrate with analytics. The analytics interface also gives you real-time monitoring to see what is happening each time and correct the course of your campaign if you don’t get what you are looking for.

Search Engine Marketing also allows controlling the daily budget that you invested as well as the maximum cost per click you can pay. With this, you can make sure your campaign is profitable. In large-scale results, it makes archive your campaign relatively fast and with budgeting is scalable small businesses can join in the market. 

Finally, another benefit of search engine marketing is segmentation. Your campaign can focus on keywords to reach the public that is interested in your business. Advantages of Search Engine Marketing tools also filter your audience by other factors such as location, language, and behaviour.

Disadvantages of Search Engine Marketing

There are a few disadvantages of Search Engine Marketing (SEM). In the long term, it can be costly because it only works when you pay. In spite of the fact that over time you’ll be able to optimise your campaigns and reduce costs per click, you’ll get to proceed to pay for each of the visits you get. 

As Search engine marketing becomes popular among other kinds of businesses they compete to position themselves for the same keywords. With that fact, this competition raises the cost and can be difficult to get a good ROI, so the high level of competition is real.

Search Engine Marketing has an “invading” nature. This means SEM can appear in the user’s space with content that they didn’t seek out. Your businesses can appear as distractions to the users. Another disadvantage is that it is also vulnerable to users that use ad blockers. If the user you’re targeting has an ad blocker, they may not see your ads.

Ready to Use Search Engine Marketing for Your Business?

As business digitalization expands so fast, using Search Engine Marketing is necessary to help achieve your business target. To make it faster to achieve the target you may use a combination with other tools such as SEO. 

Search Engine Marketing practices’ success and failure are 50-50, so you will need to hire an experienced digital marketing professional to decrease the risk for your campaign. If you are looking for a Digital Marketing strategy to improve your business then we can help you. Check out Pixie Digital,  a digital marketing agency Bali. You can trust us for the paid ads service and let us do the magic!