Search Engine Marketing: Advantages & Disadvantages

“Search Engine Marketing”

Advantages (and disadvantages) of the SEM

Undoubtedly, search engine marketing is a powerful and appropriate tool for almost all types of brands. To evaluate when and how to include it, I will comment on its main advantages and disadvantages.

Advantages

• Highly measurable. Tools like Google Ads give you highly detailed reports of the evolution of your campaign, so you can always know what happens with your ads. In addition, you can take advantage of the integration with Analytics to have everything controlled to perfection.
• Real time monitoring. The analytics interface allows you to see what is happening at each moment and corrects the course to the moment if you do not get the results you are looking for.
• Pay per click. In this way, you will only pay if you get results. You can control at all times the maximum daily budget that you are willing to invest as well as the maximum cost per click you can pay. In this way, you make sure that the campaign is profitable in all cases.
• Speed. Regarding other techniques such as SEO or content marketing, search engine advertising allows you to achieve relatively fast and large-scale results.
• Within everyone’s reach. Since budgetary investment is scalable, this solution works for both large companies and SMEs. They all compete in equal conditions in the “struggle” to reach the first positions for the keywords.
• Segmentation. Finally, another strong point of this tool are its great segmentation possibilities. By focusing on keywords, we will reach the public that is actively interested in us. We can filter it by other factors such as location, language or behavior.

Disadvantages

• Higher long-term cost. Speaking clearly: the SEM only works while you pay. Although over time you can optimize your campaigns and reduce costs per click, you will have to continue paying for each of the visits you get.
• High level of competition. The Search Engine Marketing has become popular and there are many companies that compete to position themselves in the same keywords. This competition causes costs to rise and sometimes it can be difficult to get a good ROI.
• It’s interruptive. Unlike other solutions such as native advertising, the SEM means “invading” the user’s space with content that it hasn’t previously required. In fact, if the user you are targeting uses an ad blocker, they may not see your ads.