Almost $20 billion spent on search engine marketing by the US in 2012

Growing competition in today's business world drives the need for companies to be recognised among a horde of rivals, thereby compelling them to constantly strive to develop, innovate, and implement strategies to acquire leadership position in the market. Online marketing is one such strategy.

Search engine marketing (SEM) is a form of internet marketing that involves the promotion of websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs) through optimization and advertising.

SEM may use search engine optimization (SEO) that adjusts or rewrites website content to achieve a higher ranking in search engine results pages or use pay per click listings.

The current economic turmoil and financial woes has only heightened the business case for Internet SEM. The economic crisis has made the average consumer more frugal about what they buy, and constantly look for best deals online, thus making the Internet even more important to marketers.

Paid search advertising has not been without controversy, and the issue of how search engines present advertising on their search result pages has been the target of a series of studies and reports by Consumer Reports WebWatch. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) also issued a letter 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.

On April 24, 2012 many started to see that Google has started to penalise companies that are buying links for the purpose of passing off the rank. The Google Update was called Penguin. SEM has, however, nothing to do with link buying and focuses on organic SEO and PPC management.

The US continues to remain the largest region within the SEM industry. This growth in the US market is attributed to the high usage of web search and continued evolution of search engine technologies in the nation.

In 2012, North American advertisers spent US$19.51 billion on search engine marketing. The largest SEM vendors were Google AdWords and Bing Ads (Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft adCenter combined.)

AdWords is recognised as a web-based advertising utensil since it adopts keywords which can deliver adverts explicitly to web users looking for information in respect to a certain product or service. This project is highly practical for advertisers as the project hinges on cost per click (CPC) pricing, thus the payment of the service only applies if their advert has been clicked on.

SEM companies have embarked on AdWords projects as a way to publicize their SEM and SEO services. This promotion has helped their business elaborate, offering added value to consumers who endeavor to employ AdWords for promoting their products and services.

The assistance of AdWord canvass could contribute to the huge success in the growth of web traffic for a number of its consumer's website, by as much as 250% in only nine months.

For more information on search engine marketing, see what our website can offer you: Search Engine Marketing

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