SEM & PPC Services

SEM (search engine marketing) and PPC (pay-per-click) are valuable digital marketing practices for nearly any business. However, before undertaking either practice, it’s vital to understand what each practice is, how each practice works, when each practice should be used, and how to generate profit-driving results as a practitioner of each. 

Defining SEM/PPC in Relation to SEO and Vendor-Purchased Demand Generation

Sometimes the easiest way to define a marketing term is to describe it in relation to other marketing terms. While SEM/PPC is one of the three major ways to demand generation and lead volume, it has key differences from its 2 neighbors (SEO and vendor-purchased demand generation). 

SEM/PPC vs. Vendor Purchased Leads

When it comes to lead quality, vendor-purchased leads are as low quality as it gets. Many of these third-party lead vendors conceal (and have the right to conceal given the need to protect their business models), the ways in which they generate leads. This, however, is problematic because, for all the buyer knows, the information gathered on these leads is suspect, incomplete, or downright fake. However, what is lacked in lead quality for vendor leads is made up for in the immediacy of results that can be generated.

SEO vs. SEM/PPC

While SEM/PPC is inferior to SEO in terms of lead quality, it is faster than SEO in its ability to generate results, and higher in lead quality than vendor purchased leads. We’ll dispel the most widely accepted misconception first: SEO (the abbreviation for search engine optimization) is not part of SEM. There is plenty of confusion surrounding the definitions of SEO (search engine optimization), SEM, and pay-per-click, and for good reasons.

E.g., SEM involves an entirely different emphasis of platforms and budget allocation than SEO, but each term is technically “search engine marketing.” Moreover, while pay-per-click is a subcomponent of SEM that means exactly what it sounds like it means (paying for clicks), SEO requires a marketing budget and, therefore, “paying per click.” However, SEO is considered an entirely different digital marketing practice from PPC. Once your head stops spinning, allow us to clarify each term in the next paragraph. 

SEO is about organic search rank, which companies earn by making great content and without paying platforms like Google Ads to show their advertisements. In terms of how major search engines choose which content to show, high-ranking first page organic (SEO-driven) search results are ordered based on click through rate, backlinks, dwell time, and other customer engagement data. 

The equivalent of that for PPC is the quality score of an ad, which boosts how it performs and appears within the ads auction algorithm on paid platforms like Google and Bing; the amount bid for each search term, and the competitiveness of the keywords involved. So, while there is some overlap between SEO and SEM/PPC practices in quality factors relevant to the audience, each comes with different infrastructures, platforms, and user expectations. 

Ways SEM/PPC Is Superior to SEO

More control over budgets

Easier to manage than in-house marketing departments or agencies

Built-in campaign structuring

Automated attribution modeling

Generates results faster than even the most skilled SEO experts

Easy-access targeting, data mining, and performance analysis

Content process simplified by automated bidding, dynamic keyword insertion (DKI) and inter-platform campaign performance enhancement suggestions

Fewer margins for error than SEO practices

Ways SEM/PPC Is Inferior to SEO

SEM/PPC’s AI tools can be misleading

SEM/PPC platforms are paid by the click (clicks are not as valuable as leads or sales)

Data embedded into SEM/PPC platforms oftentimes aggregates information from sources irrelevant to their users, which can make for wasted marketing budgets

SEM/PPC is more “interruption” and outbound marketing-based than SEO, which means fewer clicks, conversions, and sales

Significant testing is oftentimes required before valuable data is acquired for PPC/SEM platforms like Google Ads and Facebook Ads Manager

PPC/SEM platforms offer misleading “bid suggestion” tips such as inflated “minimum” bid amounts just to make more money without giving you an equivalent degree of value. This means “ratcheting” and testing hypothetical bid floors continually to gauge the true cost per click for a given keyword

Tightening data protection and consumer privacy laws make garnering actionable customer data on these platforms increasingly difficult 

When Do You Need SEM/PPC for Your Business?

Your sales staff lacks leads and is compensated primarily by commissions from closed deals. This need for immediate leads that PPC offers becomes even more important if you want to retain your current sales team. 

You’ve cycled through numerous third party lead sellers and are dissatisfied with the results. From here, PPC becomes a strong entry point for “owned” lead generation and parlay information gathered in this medium to future organic/SEO-driven demand generation. 

Your company has given a stringent marketing budget with few allotments (if any) for variable expenses, and on a specific timetable with clear expectations

Your company isn’t yet ready to invest in an in-house marketing department, but wants to begin allocating some budget toward the management of paid marketing platforms

You’re targeting or are limited to targeting highly geo-specific areas in order to find customers (this is especially true if you sell products or services globally)

You have a clearly defined customer persona and extensive customer contact lists (which helps with building audiences for targeting optimization on PPC platforms)

Understanding Key PPC Platforms

Roughly 90% of the world’s PPC budget is allocated to 8 platforms: Google Ads, Microsoft (Bing) Ads, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Pinterest. A key caveat to all 8 of these PPC platforms is that they can gobble up your money faster than you can blink (with little results to show you for it) if you hire an unskilled pay-per-click advertising agency or specialist to manage your SEM campaigns.

While these tools are major components of how traditional and social media search engines earn their money, the bulk of their revenue is from gobbling up wasted marketing budgets allocated to poorly structured ad campaigns and useless clicks with the wrong intent. Thus, it’s important to remember that these tools are not search engines as much as they are marketing engines.