SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing, or Search Marketing. Strategies use both paid and unpaid methods to increase search engine visibility and gain website traffic. Areas of search marketing include paid, organic and local.
Paid Search Marketing
What do you do when you want to find a product or service? You turn to Google or Bing to find them! Paid search marketing is the ads you see at the top of the search engine results.
The most popular way to run a paid search campaign is through Google AdWords, the most used search engine in all of the lands. Bing Ads follows closely behind.
Simplified overview of how paid search works:
- Set up an account in Google AdWords.
- Determine monthly budget.
- Research keywords that best suit your photography business.
- Create a text ad supporting keywords.
- Create a relevant landing page on your photography website.
- Watch your paid search campaign soar!
Organic Search Marketing
Organic search marketing is optimizing your photography website so that it is visible to search engines. Search Engine Optimization, SEO, allows your website to list higher in the search results pages.
SEO includes attention to the technical details of your pages, like title tags, alt image text and meta descriptions. For photographers, it’s also important to note in addition to SEO, there is Image Optimization. A process where data that resides inside the IPTC of an image is optimized according to your business.
How does one get to the top of the search engine results page? By creating great photography content that other people will want to link to. Actually there’s more, however, these are two of the three that Google ranks the highest.
Local Search Marketing
Local search marketing is optimizing your website to be found in map and business listings in search engines.
