What is SEM or Search Engine Marketing?

New York Times has defined Search Engine Marketing as practice of buying paid search listings. SEM or Search Engine Marketing, in simple words is a marketing method by which your website is made visible in the search engine results. People generally use big search engines like Google, Ask or MSN to find products and services they need. SEM is the best way of driving customer traffic to your website. Paid Listing, Pay Per Click (PPC) or Search Engine Optimization (SEO) are some of the Search Engine Marketing method. SEM thus helps your website to be listed in the results of search engines.

Now some may ask why we need a Search Engine Marketing? The answer lies in a survey, which shows that more than 73% of the new visitors of a website come from search engine. The survey also shows that nearly 90% of the online purchase originates from search engines. There are more that 40 million websites online at present. How will the customer reach your website? Or how can we best reach the customer when they are seeking our kind of products and services while using a search engine? Here, SEM comes as an answer to this. According to a survey done, 69% of the respondents said that SEM was their highest performing marketing activity.