Whether your goal is to boost your organic search ranking, build and manage high-converting paid advertising campaigns, or simply make sure your marketing efforts are reaching your target audience, an effective SEM strategy is the key to improving your online presence and gaining an edge over your competitors in the digital space.
As a full-service online marketing agency, HawkSEM offers a broad range of campaign management services to help companies drive results. These include PPC management, landing page design and optimization, shopping and feed management, and remarketing.
“The biggest thing has been that you all have gone above and beyond to understand our business, technology, and differentiators. Hawk has really influenced our way of thinking for the better.”
– Jimmy Tam, CEO, Peer Software
What is SEM and How Does it Work?
Search engine marketing (SEM) is a digital strategy used to make your website more visible in search engine results pages (SERPs). Search engine marketing involves a wide range of efforts such as:
- Conversion rate optimization
- Email marketing
- Paid social media marketing
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
- Content marketing
We’ll go into all of these in detail later on, but what you need to know now is that SEM involves using paid advertising to ensure your product or service ends up in a coveted, high-ranking spot on SERPs. Marketers achieve this by conducting thorough keyword research to optimize your search ads, understanding your target audience, and more.
Why SEM?
Search engine marketing comprises of both SEO and PPC advertising, or paid search.
The former focuses on optimizing the content on your website to drive traffic and rank higher on the SERP, while the latter involves building and managing paid ad campaigns.
Together, SEO and PPC offer key benefits for your business — which is why it’s important to find a search engine marketing company that understands the intricacies of each, with the experience and resources to create and continually augment your content.
Why you should invest in SEM
From keyword tweaking to adjusting your bidding strategy, managing SEM can easily be a full-time job. As you begin to see improvements and gain a better understanding of what makes your ads successful, you still have to track, adjust, and optimize them to get the best bang for your buck. Investing in quality SEM services can help you reach your marketing goals faster and ensure your ads are relevant, offer something of value for potential customers, and get results.
What Are SEM Services?
SEM services are the various SEO and PPC marketing strategies implemented to increase brand engagement online and drive growth. These services are generally provided by an agency, independent contractor, consultant, or in-house marketing team member.
These search engine marketing services include creating, managing, and optimizing paid search campaigns using platforms such as Google Ads (formerly Google AdWords), Meta Ads (formerly Facebook Ads), and Microsoft Advertising (formerly Bing Ads), as well as designing and launching visually appealing landing pages that increase conversions.
For e-commerce brands, SEM services may also include building, managing, and continually updating your product feed to drive sales and help businesses outperform their competitors.
Remarketing is also an effective SEM tool across multiple industries and verticals, allowing companies to “retouch” potential customers who visited their website but did not convert.
SEO vs. SEM
Quality SEM services involve using both SEO and PPC in tandem. It’s a lot of acronyms, we know, but when cooked just right, this delicious alphabet soup does wonders for your digital marketing campaigns.
The main distinction to keep in mind is that SEM is a multi-faceted marketing technique which involves strategically bidding for ad spots in the first few results of a search engine result page (SERP) through things like paid search and PPC. SEO focuses on ranking organically by using relevant keywords and offering quality content.
Simply put, there really is no rivalry between SEO, SEM, PPC, and the like. They just play different roles.
What Are the Benefits of Search Engine Marketing?
The benefits of search engine marketing cannot be understated. Not only will an effective SEM strategy enable you to increase your online visibility to build an even broader customer base, but it will also help you understand who your customers are and how to reach them.
When done correctly, SEM will drive traffic to your website and generate more quality leads for your business, increase brand engagement, and enable you to stay competitive within your industry.
Perhaps one of the most important — if not the most important — benefits is the ability to continually test, analyze, and measure the success of your marketing efforts. By keeping track of key metrics such as clicks, impressions, and high-performing keywords, SEM provides the data you need to make changes quickly and optimize your marketing campaigns for success.
Power Up Your PPC Management
You spend too much time and energy on your business to let just anyone handle your PPC marketing.
You need a search engine marketing agency partner who can deliver results like these:
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7х
Increase conversions up to 7X (Direct TV)
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2x / 3x
Double lead quality (Datadog) and nearly triple lead volume
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500%
Increase revenue by more than 500% (686)
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30 Million
Create campaigns that reach 30 million people (Honda)
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2x
Double new clients (New Century Financial)
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80%
Increase month-over-month return on ad spend (ROAS) by 80% (Swimsuits Direct)
DILO specializes in emission-free SF6 gas handling.
After a website redesign in 2019, they lost some of their strong keyword rankings and saw a notable decrease in organic traffic. Upon evaluating the company’s current SEO efforts, HawkSEM was able to pinpoint a handful of fixes to ensure their site was optimized, fast, and easy to navigate. As a result, DILO was able to:
- See a 36% increase in organic clicks in 6 months
- Increase Google clicks for high-value keywords by 24% in 3 months
- See a 46% increase in Google impressions in 3 months
“It’s been a pleasure working with the HawkSEM team. Yara and Vane are extremely knowledgeable and always explain complicated SEO things in a way that even I can understand. They take the time to listen to our concerns and provide solutions and feedback that make our jobs easier. The writers and designers do a great job at creating content for our specialized and niche industry, which is a real challenge. I’m really pleased with the success and results we’ve seen in just a few months of working together.”
– Lina Probst Encinias, Marketing & Training Manager, DILO
HawkSEM’s Search Engine Marketing Services:
- Conversion Rate Optimization
- Email Marketing
- Paid Social Media Marketing
- Performance Display
- PPC Management
- Remarketing
- Search Engine Optimization
- Content Marketing
- Shopping & Feed Management
Let’s dig into each of these below.
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Conversion Rate Optimization
Driving more traffic to your website isn’t enough to be successful. You need to make sure that traffic converts (i.e., makes a purchase or does the thing you want them to do, such as download a form or book an appointment).
An effective SEM strategy will analyze data from every stage in the buying cycle to increase your conversion rate, using tools such as heatmapping and scroll tracking, user session recording, funnel analysis, A/B testing, and more.
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Email Marketing
Email engagement is on the rise, and smart businesses understand the benefit of increasing their email marketing budget. But if those emails aren’t getting opened because of costly mistakes? You can kiss those extra dollars goodbye.
That’s where search engine marketing comes in. Clearly defined goals and a strong value proposition, combined with customized audience targeting, email timing and frequency optimization, and detailed tracking can help you knock your email campaigns out of the proverbial park.
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Performance Display
Performance display campaigns are targeted, direct-response campaigns created to encourage a specific (and immediate) action based on your business and its unique goals.
Unlike other campaigns that may focus heavily on elevating brand awareness, performance display campaigns deliver a clear and concise call-to-action (CTA) so that users know exactly what you want them to do right now. This is done using a variety of tactics, including proper ad placement, carefully crafted messaging, and tasteful remarketing.
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Paid Social Media Marketing
Did you know that over 90% of U.S. marketers use social media for marketing purposes? There’s no denying the power of social media in our digital world — especially if you’re a business trying to reach more potential customers.
By adding targeted paid social campaigns to their SEM blueprint, companies can strengthen their online presence, learn more about their customers and their behavior, drive more high-quality traffic to their website, and expand their reach within their industry.
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PPC Management
Pay-per-click marketing, when executed properly, is an efficient and cost-effective strategy to generate quality leads and drive growth. But regardless of how sophisticated modern PPC platforms like Google Ads may be, PPC management is not something you can simply put on auto pilot.
Rather, it requires diligent research, planning, execution, and tracking to create compelling PPC ad copy and continually optimize PPC campaigns to ensure their success. With the right agency partner handling your PPC management, you can easily gain an edge over your competitors.
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Shopping & Feed Management
For e-commerce businesses, your shopping feed can make or break your success. How you describe your products, along with the images and other assets you use to promote them, requires a considerable amount of thought and research if you want to make sure your products stand out in the competitive online shopping arena.
Building and managing a strong shopping feed ensures the right people see your products at the right time.
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Remarketing
Retargeted customers are three times more likely to click on your ad than those who have had no previous interaction with your brand, which is one of the key reasons why remarketing should be an integral part of your SEM approach.
Nowadays, it takes multiple “touches” or points of contact before a potential customer takes action, so keeping your ads in front of people who have shown interest in your product or service ensures your business will be their first stop when they’re ready to convert.
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Search Engine Optimization (and Content Marketing)
Ranking higher on the SERP means greater visibility for your business, which leads to increased website traffic and ultimately more conversions.
SEO services involve continually monitoring your site and making the necessary changes or improvements to boost your ranking organically — from improving site speed and crawlability to conducting keyword research and enhancing the quality of the content on your site pages to more closely match common search queries.
Luxury home furnishings and décor provider Grayson Living wanted to increase their e-commerce sales.
They were looking to to thoughtfully and strategically leverage and scale their marketing budget to attract more online buyers and complement brick-and-mortar sales.
Using a combination of strategic retargeting, feed optimization, display advertising, cross-platform advertising, campaign optimization, and custom landing page creation, HawkSEM was able to help Grayson Living:
Not only does a strong PPC program keep your brand visible online, but it can help enhance your marketing efforts, such as:
- Receive almost 6 times their return on ad spend (ROAS) over 3 years
- Grow e-commerce sales by 279% (year 1), 260% (year 2), and 55% (year 3)
- Bump the average order value by 11% in the first year alone
Why Partner with an SEM Agency?
Search engine marketing is a key component of your overall digital marketing strategy, one that is critical to the success of large, mid-size, and small businesses. However, just because you’re a seasoned marketing manager or a small business owner doesn’t mean you’re an expert.
On top of that, SEM is essentially a full-time job. While you may be able to get many of the key components in place, you may not have the resources (or bandwidth) necessary to continually optimize your efforts, track your results, and tackle any issues that may arise.
Partnering with an experienced SEM agency will help you grow and scale your business without the hassle and uncertainty that comes with trying to do everything on your own.
The HawkSEM Difference
At HawkSEM, every member of our team is a seasoned marketer, so you can rest assured you are in the very best hands.
Each client is paired with a dedicated team that includes a senior-level strategist, account manager, and client success manager, all of whom have an intimate knowledge of your business and are available to answer questions and troubleshoot any issues that may arise.
We also offer design and development services for mid-market and small business clients who may not have an in-house professional.
ConversionIQ
Let’s get back to ConversionIQ. This is HawkSEM’S proprietary marketing technology, built to deliver actionable insights that can help your business achieve full-funnel attribution and generate high-quality conversions.
The exclusive ConversionIQ system utilizes a robust reporting dashboard to ensure your SEM campaigns are continually optimized and primed to reach the right audience, which significantly benefits your bottom line.
Distinctive Partnerships
HawkSEM is proud to be a Google Premier Partner. Google’s most exclusive partnership tier, this partnership has recognized us as being in the top 3% of participating companies each year based on factors such as client growth and retention, product diversification, and annual ad spend. HawkSEM is also a Meta Business Partner and a Microsoft Advertising Partner.
No Contracts
With HawkSEM, you never have to worry about signing a long-term contract. Services are provided on a month-to-month basis, and there is never any obligation to continue if you are unhappy with your campaign performance (though we suspect you’ll be very happy). We also believe in transparent pricing with no-hassle flat fees so you know exactly what you’re getting.
Free Consultation
At the end of the day, our mission at HawkSEM is to significantly improve your digital marketing results. As a full-service SEM agency, we bring to the table a team of industry experts focused on data-driven optimization and a patent-pending conversion system designed to help you dramatically increase your ROI year after year.
“We understand how much is riding on your SEM campaigns. Our approach to success begins with taking the time to learn about your brand, your industry, and your precise goals so that nothing is left to chance. Unlike many other agencies, we’re not just consultants; we also develop and execute clear strategies to help you scale your business and outperform the competition — every time.”
– Sam Yadegar, CEO of HawkSEM
Meet The Team
We make things happen …but don’t take our word for it:
The Bottom Line
In our increasingly digital world, companies can no longer afford to be lax about their online presence and marketing efforts. If your target audience isn’t seeing your ads because you didn’t use the right keywords, or if your organic ranking is dismal because your website content isn’t optimized, your business (and your profits) will suffer the consequences.
Whether your goal is to create killer PPC ads, rank higher on the SERP, increase e-commerce sales and lead generation, or simply to elevate your brand’s visibility, you need to have a well-thought-out advertising strategy that includes search engine marketing. If that feels like too monumental a task to tackle on your own, it may be time to find an SEM team that can help you carve a clear path to success.
The SEM experts at HawkSEM will provide a comprehensive proposal tailored to your business and show you how we can take your marketing to the next level.
Request a Free Consultation
No BS, just results. Average clients see a 4.5x ROI
- Dramatically improve ROI
- Outperform the competition
- Increase conversion volume
- Better track ROI
- Reduce cost per acquisition
- Improve lead quality