What Is an SEM Agency?

To understand what an “SEM agency” is and does, you must first get familiar with search engine marketing (SEM), which involves two distinct digital marketing strategies.

It’s a long-winded process that many online marketing companies make even more complex to convince you that your only hope for search engine success is blindly trusting them.

But we’re not like other agencies. So, to help you grasp what an SEM agency is, let’s break down the two marketing concepts that make SEM: search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.

Let’s start with SEO. It’s a digital marketing technique for boosting organic (nonpaid) rankings on search engine results pages (SERPs) and putting more eyes on your business.

While specific optimisations can vary from business to business, our SEO services focus on tweaking your website’s on-page, off-page, and technical elements, which typically involve:

• Raising your website’s PageSpeed score, which is the metric that measures how quickly website visitors can open your web pages
• Content marketing, which involves producing informative, high-quality content materials, like articles and blogs
• Earning backlinks, which are hyperlinks from relevant, authoritative websites that redirect internet users to your site

The question is, “What’s the point of aiming for a higher rank?” Simple: The higher your search rankings, the better the odds potential customers will find and engage with your business.

 After all, people trust search engines like Google to provide the “best” answers to their questions. So, if you appear prominently on SERPs, consumers are more inclined to believe you’re the #1 brand.

Unfortunately, SEO is often a long-term strategy for building online visibility. Google estimates a four-month to a year timeline. Here’s where our second digital marketing concept comes in.

PPC advertising, such as through Google Ads (formerly Google AdWords and Google AdWords Express), is the paid approach to building a robust digital presence.

It’s a strategy wherein you pay a publisher like Google to display advertisements on its platform. You’re charged for every click or traffic your marketing materials generate.

Unlike SEO, PPC can give your business, products, and services immediate online visibility, making it a cost-effective solution. However, PPC is by no means the better strategy.

The most significant downside to PPC marketing campaigns is that they don’t offer the best return on investment (ROI), as paid advertisements only pick up 30% of searchers.

Here’s where SEM comes in. SEM combines SEO techniques with PPC advertising, giving your business an instant presence on search engines while leveraging people’s preference for organic results.

In short, an SEM agency is a firm that can fuse organic tactics with paid advertisements into a single, harmonious marketing campaign that drives potential customers toward your products and services.

What Is the Role of SEM?

SEM can be vital to advancing your business. It can help you connect with consumers looking for Australian-based enterprises, products, and services like yours on search engines.

 But unlike a separate SEO or PPC campaign, an SEM initiative lets you capture potential clients on organic and paid search engine channels, not one or the other.

Social media marketing (SMM) plays a similar role. It’s also a digital marketing strategy that leverages organic methods and paid ads. The only difference is that SMM enhances your social media visibility.

SEM for Increasing Your Website Traffic:

SEM offers various benefits, from helping you expand your business’ reach to enabling you to cultivate meaningful relationships with your desired audience in the digital space.

But if we’re to pick one critical advantage of leveraging SEM into your internet marketing strategy, it’s that it can drive significant traffic toward your business’ website.

Looking at the organic aspect of SEM, the top three results often get 54.4% of the clicks. Meanwhile, SEM’s paid component literally and figuratively lets you buy traffic.

What Are Examples of SEM?

SEM can be a game-changer for your business. However, your past experiences with search engine marketing services may tell you otherwise. But let’s make one thing clear: SEM does work.

How do we know? Our SEM services have helped over 1,800 businesses across 355 industries secure prominent positions on Google’s SERPs and, by extension, improve their bottom line.

Take Communicate Speech Pathology, a provider of comprehensive speech and language therapy for people who have communication disorders, such as Down syndrome, Parkinson’s disease, and cerebral palsy.

Our SEM project management has helped them become a trusted name in areas like Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane, with their speech pathologists completing over 200,000 speech therapy sessions. Here are the numbers demonstrating how we’ve helped this particular client:

• Improving their monthly organic website traffic by 13,300%
• Securing 66% more qualified leads
• Giving them 227% more appearances in Google’s Top 3 rankings
• Raising their conversion rate by 44.42%
• Reducing their cost per conversion by 77.75%

If you need more examples of our SEM strategies at work, check out our other case studies or schedule a consultation by calling 1300-891-181 or emailing [email protected].

Is Google an SEM?

Google is a search engine, not SEM itself. But we understand the association. After all, most agencies, including ours, primarily leverage the search engine giant to give businesses like yours online visibility.

And for good reason. Google accounts for around 93.64% of Australia’s search engine market share. By focusing our SEM efforts on Google, we can give your business millions of potential customers.

Fortunately, we’re nothing if not flexible. After all, our online marketing services, including SEM, extend to other search engines like Bing, giving you an additional channel from which to squeeze more leads.

Why Hiring an SEM Agency Is Important

Here’s something other SEM agencies won’t tell you: You can implement SEO strategies and launch paid advertisements without professional help.

Resources like WebFX, Semrush, and our blogs can give you the tools to effectively launch and manage SEM campaigns. However, we recommend that you consider hiring an SEM service provider like us.

Why? The learning curve is steep and, more importantly, expensive as the competition becomes more cutthroat. After all, you’re simultaneously trying to use two complex digital marketing strategies: SEO and PPC.

By partnering with an SEM company like ours, you can leverage our 15+ years of experience and techniques crafted from advanced statistical analysis, data modelling, and niche segmentation.

“The outcome was beyond my expectation; we are very pleased with the results and their excellent customer service. I would highly recommend Digital Spotlight’s services for your business!”

Sophie Sutjiadi | Grace Hotel

Is SEM (Search Engine Marketing) a Solid Investment?

It’s easy for us to say that SEM can be a profitable investment for your business—many digital marketing agencies do. Unfortunately, that’s not always the case.

Every enterprise is unique. An eCommerce business will have distinct challenges from a brick-and-mortar establishment, just as a venture in South Australia will have different needs from a North Australia-based one.

That’s why we do our homework first. We research, analyse, and audit our clients’ SEM situations before we ask for a single cent. After all, SEM isn’t for everyone.

Fortunately, we’ll tell you if we don’t believe SEM is the investment your business needs to attract more customers. We’d rather lose you as a client than waste your hard-earned money.

What Do SEM Agencies Charge?

Many firms will quickly value their SEM services in dollars, claiming that an X-dollar investment will yield Y results. But we take a more deliberate approach to our pricing.

Why? Simple: We don’t want to mislead you into thinking that a single number guarantees you returns. Too many variables can impact a managed SEM campaign and, by extension, its cost.

Take keywords, for example. On the SEO side, our pricing structure varies based on the service package or the number of keywords involved in the campaign.

Here’s what our SEO service suites look like:

We also have an enterprise-level SEO package combining SEO with public relations (PR), content marketing, and social media marketing (SMM), further complicating the pricing.

On the PPC aspect of an SEM campaign, providing the exact cost for keywords is even more impossible, as prices fluctuate based on various factors, including the keyword’s competitiveness.

But here’s what we can tell you: When we decide to quote you, that figure will be all-inclusive. In other words, you’ll pay a fixed fee for our services—no hidden fees, no performance bonuses.

“[Digital Spotlight’s] team was able to get us leads for almost half the price we were getting before, and the quality of leads were more than 50% better… in only 4 weeks!”

Yuri Marshall | VisaOne

A Successful Project Branches From a Successful Company

Success in the digital landscape requires you to become a strategist—find the most effective way to use your marketing budget. That involves choosing the right online marketing partner.

If you choose the wrong one to entrust your SEM needs, you’ll find yourself in the same position that led you to this write-up—disappointed with the lack of tangible results.

So, to help you filter the digital marketing companies you’d want in your corner from those you must avoid, let us talk a little bit about ourselves, Digital Spotlight.