what is sem in marketing

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is a form of internet marketing that involves promoting websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results pages primarily through paid advertising. SEM is a digital marketing strategy used to increase the visibility of a website in search engine results pages (SERPs) . Advertisers bid on keywords that users of services such as Google and Bing might enter when looking for certain products or services, which gives the advertiser the opportunity for their ads to appear alongside results for those search queries. SEM helps companies bring their products and services to the attention of audiences through paid search engine advertising. SEM is an online marketing strategy in which organizations buy targeted ad space at the top of search engine result pages (SERP) . SEM is different from SEO, which focuses on optimizing content for search engine algorithms so the content ranks high on the SERP. SEM is also alternately referred to as paid search or pay per click (PPC) .