Search engine marketing, or SEM, is a form of Local business marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs) through the use of search engine optimization, paid placement, contextual advertising, and paid inclusion.

Local Online Advertising and Local Search Marketing Changes

As the number of sites on the Web increased in the mid-to-late 90s, 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 in 1996 and then Goto.com in 1998.

In a market dominated by Google, in 2009 Yahoo! and Microsoft announced the intention to forge an alliance. The Yahoo! & Microsoft Search Alliance eventually received approval from regulators in the US and Europe in February 2010.

Search engine optimization consultants expanded their offerings to help businesses learn about and use the advertising opportunities offered by search engines, and new agencies focusing primarily upon marketing and advertising through search engines emerged.

The term Search Engine Marketing was 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.

More recent theoretical advances include Search Engine Marketing Management. SEMM relates to activities including SEO but focuses on return on investment (ROI) management instead of relevant traffic building (as is the case of mainstream SEO).

SEMM also integrates organic SEO, trying to achieve top ranking without using paid means of achieving top in search engines, and PayPerClick SEO. 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.

Vested interests appear to use the expression SEM to mean exclusively Pay per click advertising to the extent that the wider advertising and marketing community have accepted this narrow definition. Such usage excludes the wider search marketing community that is engaged in other forms of SEM such as Search Engine Optimization and Search Retargeting.

Another ethical controversy associated with search marketing has been the issue of trademark infringement. The debate as to whether third parties should have the right to bid on their competitors brand names has been underway for years.

In 2009 Google changed their policy, which formerly prohibited these tactics, allowing 3rd parties to bid on branded terms as long as their landing page in fact provides information on the trademarked term. Though the policy has been changed this continues to be a source of heated debate.

In Local online advertising, Search Advertising is a method of placing online advertisements on Web pages that show results from search engine queries. Through the same search-engine advertising services, ads can also be placed on Web pages with other published.

Search advertisements are targeted to match key search terms (called keywords) entered on search engines. This targeting ability has contributed to the attractiveness of search advertising for advertisers. Consumers will often use a search engine to identify and compare purchasing options immediately before making a purchasing decision.

The opportunity to present consumers with advertisements tailored to their immediate buying interests encourages consumers to click on search ads instead of unpaid search results, which are often less relevant. Unpaid search results are also called organic results.

Search advertising is sold and delivered on the basis of keywords. The user of a search engine enters keywords to make queries. A keyword may consist of more than one word.

Search engines conduct running auctions to sell ads according to bids received for keywords and relative relevance of user keywords to ads in the inventory. The keyword home mortgage refinancing is more expensive than one that is in less demand, such as used bicycle tires.’

The Profit potential of the keywords also plays into bids for ads that advertisers want displayed when the keywords are searched by the user. For example, used book may be a popular keyword but may have low profit potential and the advertiser bids will reflect that.

Search engines build indexes of Web pages using a web Crawler. When the publisher of a Web page arranges with a search engine firm to have ads served up on that page, the search engine applies their indexing technology to associate the content of that page with keywords.

Those keywords are then fed into the same auctioning system that is used by advertisers to buy ads on both search engine results pages. Advertising based on keywords in the surrounding content or context is referred to as Contextual advertising. This is usually less profitable than search advertising which is based on user intent expressed through their keywords.

Advertisers can choose whether to buy ads on search result pages (search advertising), published content pages (contextual advertising), or both. Bids on the same keywords are usually higher in search advertising than in contextual advertising.

Local internet marketing, also referred to as i-marketing, web-marketing, online-marketing, Search Engine Marketing (SEM) or e-Marketing, is the marketing of products or services over the Internet.

The Internet has brought media to a global audience. The interactive nature of Local internet marketing in terms of providing instant response and eliciting responses, is a unique quality of the medium.

Local internet marketing is sometimes considered to have a broader scope because it not only refers to the Internet, e-mail, and wireless media, but it includes management of digital customer data and electronic customer relationship management (ECRM) systems.

Local internet marketing ties together creative and technical aspects of the Internet, including: design, development, advertising, and sales.

Local internet marketing also refers to the placement of media along many different stages of the customer engagement cycle through search engine marketing (SEM), search engine optimization (SEO), banner ads on specific websites, e-mail marketing, and Web 2.0 strategies.

The advantage of Local internet marketing is that its relatively inexpensive when compared to the ratio of cost against the reach of the target audience. Companies can reach a wide audience for a small fraction of traditional advertising budgets.

The nature of the medium allows consumers to research and purchase products and services at their own convenience. Therefore, businesses have the advantage of appealing to consumers in a medium that can bring results quickly.

Internet marketers also have the advantage of measuring statistics easily and inexpensively. Nearly all aspects of an Local internet marketing campaign can be traced, measured, and tested.

The advertisers can use a variety of methods: pay per impression, pay per click, pay per play, or pay per action. Therefore, marketers can determine which messages or offerings are more appealing to the audience.

The results of campaigns can be measured and tracked immediately because online marketing initiatives usually require users to click on an advertisement, visit a website, and perform a targeted action.

Such measurement cannot be achieved through billboard advertising, where an individual will at best be interested, then decide to obtain more information at a later time.

Because exposure, response, and overall efficiency of Internet media are easier to track than traditional off-line media—through the use of web analytics for instance—Internet marketing can offer a greater sense of accountability for advertisers.

Marketers and their clients are becoming aware of the need to measure the collaborative effects of marketing (i.e., how the Internet affects in-store sales) rather than siloing each advertising medium. The effects of multichannel marketing can be difficult to determine, but are an important part of ascertaining the value of media campaigns.