Search engine marketing is an effective way to make your site known—to get both free and paid traffic in a sustainable manner. As such, a lot of bloggers and online entrepreneurs need this service. Instead of studying SEM themselves, they would rather have somebody work this out for them.
But what services must you offer to your clients if you have an SEM business?
These services are:
- Search Engine Optimization
- Ad Creatives
- Pay Per Click
- Social Media Marketing
- Web Design and Compliance
We will discuss each of these, and by the end of this tutorial, you should have a broad view of why these services matter to your SEM business.
Search Engine Optimization
It is true that SEO and SEM are different things. SEO is the process of getting free traffic, but SEM is the process of getting paid traffic.
Despite the difference, you can only market a business in search engines if you know which keywords matter. Without search engine optimization. You will be picking keywords that are too expensive or keywords that have no search volume.
If your focus is Google, then use the resources in Google to plan your SEM approach. Google Ads has a keyword planner, and you are taking the right direction if you use this, too. It tells you the low and high bids for a keyword, and you will also see the interest score of the keyword you selected.
Here are the things you need to do SEO:
- SEO tools like AHREF or SEMRush
- Tailored SEO research for your client’s business
- Website optimization tools
You cannot offer an SEM service without SEO. Your clients will ask you if you have adequate knowledge about it. Even if you place ads on Google, Bing, or Yahoo, using the wrong keyword in your ad placement will lead to poor results and wasted advertising money.
Ad Creatives
As a service provider for search engine marketing, you are in a better position to do the ad creatives for your clients. It does not make sense to ask your client to order this from someone else, as the person who does it may not know how to create ads that convert.
Here are some of the ad creatives you can do:
- Copywriting – after doing your keyword research, you should be able to write a compelling copy that is going to put your ad on top of the others. Your copywriting skills are what make your ad get clicks. And if you get more clicks, Google is going to show your ad at the top of the page over the others.
- Videography and Animation – videos and animations are great ads. You can use them in your search engine marketing, not on Google but on YouTube. Many people think that YouTube is a social media channel.
It isn’t.
YouTube is a search engine—for videos. If you can create a great video ad with the right keywords, this video is going to appear on top of the YouTube search results.
- Images – the images you place on the ads are what will show on the PPC ads that you advertise. These are images that show in blogs that show ads from Google AdSense.
As you can see, offering ad creatives makes the entire SEM process a closed loop within your company. If you have no employees who can do these, you can outsource your copywriting or ad creatives to freelancers, and then only order what you need.
Pay Per Click
If you operate an SEM business, you might as well as offer pay-per-click packages. What does this mean?
It means that you are the one who will upload the ads on Google, not your client. This is a sweet deal because many clients do not know how to advertise on Google or other search engine platforms.
Here are the things that should be included in your PPC plans:
- Payment for the service – this is the payment that goes to you for your efforts
- Payment for the ads – this is what you charge your client for the costs of the ads that you will pay to Google or Bing or other search engines
- Report – you have to be able to provide a success report for the ads that you publish for your clients
These three are just the basics. It is up to you to charge more. For example, the copywriting service and the ad creative services may be inclusive of the price of the service. You could also charge them separately.
You can also include services like keyword tracking, traffic report, industry analysis, keyword analysis, ad Google Shopping, and so much more. Create plans that are flexible and dynamic—make sure your clients have the choice about how much they want to spend on ads.
Social Media Marketing
Why should this be a part of your SEM business?
Social media marketing is indispensable from marketing. The idea is that Google also records the popularity and relevance of social media and even forum sites. This is why sometimes, the search results in Google also show links to social media channels and even forums.
In an SEM business, you want to use keywords that work not just in Google but also in social media channels. For example, if you know what people are searching for on Facebook, then you know what keywords to use.
Here are the things you can offer on social media:
- Set-up – you have to set-up the client’s Facebook page.
- Assessment – you need to assess the client’s strength in social media; this includes follower count.
- Campaign – this is the stage where you create the ad for the client; it is also the phase where you choose if the purpose of the ad is for awareness, traffic, or conversion.
- Reporting – you must provide a detailed analysis of how your ad or campaign worked, what results were achieved, and how you plan to optimize the ads next time.
At the very least, you must start your social media SEM service with Facebook. Later on, you can move on to providing services for other platforms like Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter.
Web Design and Compliance
User experience and interface are part of a successful search engine marketing business. If your client’s website is full of problems, Google and other search engines will not rank them. Worse, they can get flagged.
As such, you need to ensure that your client meets the basic expectations of a website that search engines will love.
Here are some examples of these services:
- SEO – website must be optimized
- Security – the site must have SSL
- Domain – must have a top-level domain
Even if you pay for advertising, if the website is marked as an unsecured website, the search engine will not put your ad in the search results pages.
Summary
SEM is a lucrative business. However, you should be able to provide results, not just effort. In an SEM business, your clients will only come back if the service you provided resulted in the most important thing for them: conversion.
In some cases, the conversion is not the goal, but awareness. The metric that you need to focus on, therefore, is traffic. Over the long term, your client must be paying for traffic at the cheapest cost possible.
These five services that we discussed today build the fundamental foundation of your SEM business. you cannot operate a successful one if the list is incomplete.
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