Search Engine Marketing

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) once meant the same thing as SEO, but now refers specifically to paid strategies — think pay-per-click, where you pay a fixed amount per click rather than earning traffic organically. SEO takes time; SEM gets you results faster. Both matter for a site's overall success.

We build SEM campaigns around three things: keywords (broad match, phrase match, exact match, negative match), targeting (location, schedule, demographic, device), and structured accounts made up of campaigns and ad groups.

We run SEM across Google Ads, Bing Ads, Yahoo! Gemini, IgnitionOne, WordStream, Acquisio, Criteo and SEMrush — picking the platform that actually fits your audience, not just the biggest name.

Getting SEM right is genuinely an ongoing discipline, not a set-and-launch task. Cost-per-click shifts as competitors adjust their own bids, negative keywords need continuous refinement as search terms reveal themselves in real usage data, and Quality Score — Google's own measure of how relevant your ad and landing page are — directly affects both your ranking position and how much you pay per click. Neglect any one of these and your cost per lead climbs even if your click volume stays flat.

Attribution matters too, and it's a genuinely common blind spot. A click doesn't always convert on the same visit — someone might click an ad, browse, leave, then come back directly or through search days later and convert then. Without proper conversion tracking set up correctly from the start, that second-visit conversion either gets misattributed to the wrong channel or missed entirely, making a genuinely working campaign look weaker on paper than it actually is.

The single biggest source of wasted spend we see is broad match keywords left unchecked, without a genuine negative keyword list to filter out irrelevant searches. A campaign targeting "web design" without excluding terms like "free," "tutorial" or "jobs" can burn through budget on clicks that were never going to become an enquiry.

The second common issue is sending paid traffic to a generic homepage instead of a dedicated landing page built for that specific ad. A visitor who clicked an ad promising one thing, then lands on a page that doesn't directly address it, converts at a fraction of the rate a properly matched landing page would.