When interviewing new prospects, our creative guy typically invites candidates for an office walk-through and introduces me as the "Google guy" (I do have a Google hacky sack on my desk and AdWords on speed dial...) and to relieve interview tension, facetiously adds that "no one knows what he does". Sidenote to creative guy: I don't know what you do either, but I will follow your web design blog so that we'll have work-related topics to talk about around the water cooler! In return, here's to my first BIGSHOT SEM Blog post.

There is to this day of writing no regulatory search engine marketing (SEM) body (although not a governing body, SEMPO is a due mention as an authoritative entity and an agent of growth for our industry) and thus no official Definition for SEM, so for my first post, I deemed à propos to present where our agency stands on this platform.

In a nutshell, what is Search Engine Marketing?

Search engine marketing is a subset of advertising that encompasses the full life cycle of a web-borne monetary or informational transaction that converts online or offline. While traditional advertising pushes a message, SEM aims at pulling an existing base of web searchers.

For example, a Kansas City florist who drives foot traffic to his local flower shop through search engine listings for flower buying-related search queries is conducting search marketing. Conversely, a florist who advertises his website through a web address on printed media is not.

The timeline of an SEM life cycle is as follows:

• Keyword research and competitive intelligence (CI) gathering
• For new site designs/redesigns: SEM assets integration pre-emption
• Landing page development or tweaking for existing frameworks
• Web media buy/launch and optimization based on action items collected in phase 1
• Targeted traffic-driving
• Conversion
• Recurring reactive optimization based on action items collected through ongoing analytics

For our house definition of common search marketing terms, please visit our SEM glossary.

Jeremy is a certified Google AdWords Professional, a pre-Panama Yahoo Search Marketing Ambassador and an accredited Microsoft adExcellence Member, and prior to BIGSHOT, has campaigned for over 150 SMB clients nationwide in both the organic and the sponsored realms of search engine marketing. Learn more about Jeremy.

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