[1] SEM may incorporate search engine optimization (SEO), which adjusts or rewrites website content and site architecture to achieve a higher ranking in search engine results pages to enhance pay per click (PPC) listings and increase the Call to action (CTA) on the website.
[8] During the trial, the US Department of Justice argued "Google hasn’t just illegally cornered the market in search — it’s squeezed online publishers and advertisers with a “trifecta” of monopolies that have harmed virtually the entire World Wide Web"[9] As the number of sites on the Web increased in the mid-to-late 1990s, search engines started appearing to help people find information quickly.
Search engines developed business models to finance their services, such as pay per click programs offered by Open Text[10] in 1996 and then Goto.com[11] in 1998.
The term "search engine marketing" was popularized by Danny Sullivan in 2001[15] to cover the spectrum of activities involved in performing SEO, managing paid listings at the search engines, submitting sites to directories, and developing online marketing strategies for businesses, organizations, and individuals.
The technology enables advertisers to bid on specific keywords or phrases and ensures ads appear with the results of search engines.
Buying traffic via PPC will deliver a positive ROI when the total cost-per-click for a single conversion remains below the profit margin.
The shopper who uses the search engine to find information tends to trust and focus on the links showed in the results pages.
A growing number of online publishers are allowing search engines such as Google to crawl content on their pages and place relevant ads on it.
[19] From an online seller's point of view, this is an extension of the payment settlement and an additional incentive to invest in paid advertising projects.
Therefore, it is virtually impossible for advertisers with limited budgets to maintain the highest rankings in the increasingly competitive search market.
More frequently, many search engines, like Yahoo!,[21] mix paid inclusion (per-page and per-click fee) with results from web crawling.
Sometimes, especially when separate teams work on SEO and PPC and the efforts are not synced, positive results of aligning their strategies can be lost.
Both teams can benefit from setting shared goals and combined metrics, evaluating data together to determine future strategy or discuss which of the tools works better to get the traffic for selected keywords in the national and local search results.
SMM is a type of marketing that involves exploiting social media to influence consumers that one company’s products and/or services are valuable.
For example, some of the attention is placed on the web page layout design and how content and information is displayed to the website visitor.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) also issued a letter[29] in 2002 about the importance of disclosure of paid advertising on search engines, in response to a complaint from Commercial Alert, a consumer advocacy group with ties to Ralph Nader.
In August 2016, the Federal Trade Commission filed an administrative complaint against 1-800 Contacts alleging, among other things, that its trademark enforcement practices in the search engine marketing space have unreasonably restrained competition in violation of the FTC Act.
[32] AdWords is recognized as a web-based advertising utensil since it adopts keywords that can deliver adverts explicitly to web users looking for information in respect to a certain product or service.
It is flexible and provides customizable options like Ad Extensions, access to non-search sites, leveraging the display network to help increase brand awareness.
A successful SEM plan is the approach to capture the relationships amongst information searchers, businesses, and search engines.
[34] The use of SEM strategic tools for businesses such as tourism can attract potential consumers to view their products, but it could also pose various challenges.
[35] These challenges could be the competition that companies face amongst their industry and other sources of information that could draw the attention of online consumers.
[34] To assist the combat of challenges, the main objective for businesses applying SEM is to improve and maintain their ranking as high as possible on SERPs so that they can gain visibility.