SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING

Search engine marketing (SEM) is the practice of increasing a website’s visibility in search engine results through paid advertising, most commonly Google Ads and Microsoft (Bing) Ads. SEM campaigns target specific keywords so a business’s ad appears when someone searches for related terms, with the business paying per click (PPC) or per impression. SEM is distinct from SEO, which focuses on organic, unpaid visibility, though the two disciplines work best when coordinated together.

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) focuses on improving organic, unpaid search rankings through technical fixes, content, and backlinks, a longer-term investment that compounds over months. SEM (Search Engine Marketing) typically refers to paid search advertising, like Google Ads, where visibility is immediate but stops the moment ad spend stops. Some definitions use SEM as an umbrella term covering both SEO and paid search, but in industry practice today, SEM is most commonly used to mean PPC and paid search specifically. The strongest digital marketing strategies use both, SEM for immediate, measurable traffic and SEO for compounding long-term visibility.

There is no universal answer, the right budget depends on your industry’s average cost-per-click, your profit margin or deal size, and how many conversions you need to gather meaningful data. As a general starting point, many small to medium businesses begin with a few thousand dollars per month to gather enough click and conversion data within 4-6 weeks to start meaningful optimisation. We help clients calculate a realistic starting budget based on their specific industry’s typical CPCs and conversion rates during the discovery phase.

Unlike SEO, SEM can generate traffic immediately once campaigns go live. However, meaningful optimization typically takes 4 to 6 weeks to accumulate enough click and conversion data to identify what’s actually working, with campaigns reaching a more stable, predictable performance range within 2 to 3 months. Anyone promising immediate, fully optimised results in week one is setting unrealistic expectations, early data is rarely sufficient for confident decision-making.

ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) measures the revenue generated for every dollar spent on advertising, for example, a 4x ROAS means $4 in revenue for every $1 spent. Clicks and impressions are vanity metrics that don’t tell you whether a campaign is actually profitable. A campaign can have a high click-through rate and still lose money if those clicks aren’t converting into paying customers. We report on CPA and ROAS, not just clicks, because those are the numbers that determine whether your ad spend is actually working.

We primarily manage Google Ads (Search, Shopping, Display, Performance Max, and YouTube) given its dominant share of search volume, along with Microsoft (Bing) Ads where relevant for a client’s audience. For broader paid social advertising (Meta, LinkedIn), this typically pairs with our social media creative design services for a coordinated paid strategy across search and social.

Yes. While our SEM work integrates seamlessly with websites we’ve built on HubSpot, WordPress, or any other platform, allowing us to optimize landing pages directly, we also manage SEM campaigns for businesses on any existing website or platform. Our initial audit identifies whether your current landing pages are helping or hurting campaign performance, and we’ll flag recommendations either way.