What We Do / SEM

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

SEM also commonly known as Google Adwords, places you almost immediately, at the top position of the Google search engine, getting your website exposed to thousands of online users.

Overview

SEM brings instant visitors to your website to view your business offerings

91% of online consumers turn to Google when looking for products and services. SEM, also commonly referred to as Google Adwords, is the utilization of Google’s advertising tool to place advertisements right at the top of Google, for what your potential customers might search.

Businesses are charged on a cost per click basis, which is determined by the market competition. There are 4 spots on the first page where most businesses bid on. Depending on the number of bidders and the amount bid for, a market rate will be determined and charged to the top 4 winning bidders on a per click basis. These changes every hour, as different businesses adopt a different bidding strategy such as higher bids for specific timings.

SEM And Its Business Value

A typical consumer looking for a product or search engine, makes a Google search. 15% of them will click on the advertisements found right at the top, while 85% of them will scroll down and click onto the top 3 natural (non-ad) positions.

Therefore businesses who wants to reach out their business offerings immediately to these consumers searching on Google, can place a budget and advertising copy within Google Adwords, the tool to conduct SEM, and have their business offerings seen by potential customers.

Especially Useful If You Need To Drive Leads Fast

SEM is especially useful for businesses that needs immediate sales enquiries. Unlike SEO which takes approximately 6 months to 12 months for a website to climb up to the top 3 spots on Google, SEM is instantaneous. By choosing your desired keyword, placing a budget and bid for an advertising spot on the top 4 spots, your website will show up as an advert within minutes after your campaign is approved by Google.

Within minutes, online consumers are able to see your business offerings. Those who are interested will clickthrough into your website, and you will be charged for that click. With that said, unfortunately it is not as easy as it sounds…

The Biggest Reason Why Adwords Campaign Fail

Based on your choice of keywords, it filters the most qualified customers who are interested in your business offering to click and visit your website. This however does not mean the paid visitor takes up your business offering immediately. This is where most business owners make mistake, and end up spending a high amount of budget for clicks, but no results.

There is 2 parts of the equation. One – once the interested user clicks on the advertisement and enters your website, two – the website design and contents will influence whether the user will finally decides to take an action, usually in the form of an enquiry or a sale. From our experience, most people forget about the 2nd part of the equation, often spending money on adverts getting users to click into an ugly looking website. Even the most qualified users will be turned off by what they see when they land on the site.

How Do You Actually Do It

A good campaign strategist, carefully considers not just the choice of keywords to bid on to find the most qualified customers, but also looks at the content and design of the landing page to determine if the qualified visitors landing on the website will be influenced to take an action.

At NightOwl, we provide suggestions and advice to overcome barriers that create friction for web visitors to convert. This can be done through a website/landing page revamp, amendments of copywriting, placing call-to-action buttons at strategic locations, that will entice your visitors to convert better. As such your ad budget won’t go to waste.

Learn How We Do SEM

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Frequently Asked Questions

Here are some echoing questions that we hear from time to time. You may find some help to your questions with the links below. Alternatively, don't hesitate to contact us via email or WhatsApp should you need further information.

When doing SEM on Google Ads, you can choose to either pay only when people click on your ads, or pay when people view your ads, if it's on the Google Display Network. Although it's flexible and you can start with a very minimal budget if you're doing Google Ads on your own, we recommend based on experience to start with at least a $1,000 minimal budget. As this is a good amount to sufficiently gauge if the market responds well to your offers. Lower than this, it won't be able to reach out to sufficient people to make a strong enough case.

In the simplest of terms, SEM is where you pay Google to put up your business ads instantly in front of your target audience, and you pay every time a potential customer clicks on your ads. SEO is where you pay an SEO agency like us to work on having your website appear on the first page of search results in the natural organic listings - which, once you're there, you don't have to pay for every single visitor clicking to your website - effectively making it cheaper than SEM. Usually you get lesser clicks from Ads as compared to clickthroughs from organic listings. Plus, you have to pay for every click on your Ad, whereas every click on your organic listings is free (you only pay the monthly SEO fees, which is a flat rate). Hence SEO is more cost effective in the longer term than SEM. But SEM affords you the instant gratification of having your business exposed to your potential target audience from Day 1.

SEO takes time for business impact to be seen, as it usually takes a couple of months before we see the site ranking on the first page for any keyword that may bring in business value. While the SEO campaign develops, businesses with additional marketing budget can see almost immediate returns if they run an SEM campaign alongside SEO as well. As long as the products or services, and the ads are approved by Google, the ads can go up immediately, get exposure to the relevant target market right from the start, and potentially start seeing enquiries and sales coming in. If the Math is right, the additional SEM component may help generate some returns that would help cover the ongoing SEO cost. Eventually, as the site reaches the first page because of SEO, you can consider reducing your SEM budget.
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