Search engine marketing is everything you do to appear on a search results page. Some of that space you buy. The rest you earn. Most people use the term for the paid half alone, and plenty of others use it for both.
That disagreement costs people money, because two agencies can quote for the same words and mean different work. So the first job is to agree what the term covers. Below you will find what sits inside it, how the two halves behave, and how to split a budget. Our guide to what performance marketing is sets search beside the other channels you buy against a result. Read that first if you want the wider picture.
What search engine marketing means
The narrow reading is simple. Search engine marketing means buying adverts on a search engine, so your listing appears above or beside the free results. Under that reading it is another name for paid search.
The broad reading takes in the free results too. Anything that wins you space on the page counts, whether you paid for it or earned it. Both readings are in daily use, which is why two quotes for the same phrase can differ so much.
When somebody offers you search engine marketing, ask one question. Does the price include work on the pages that rank without payment, or only the advertising?
The two halves of a results page
Open any commercial search and the shape is familiar. Adverts sit at the top, labelled as adverts or as sponsored. Free listings sit below them. A local search usually adds a map, and a shopping search often adds a row of products. Search engines rearrange this furniture regularly, so look at your own results page rather than at a diagram.
Every one of those slots answers the same typed question. However, they behave nothing alike as investments. One starts today and stops when you stop paying. The other is slow to arrive and keeps working afterwards.
What sits inside search engine marketing
The work divides into a handful of jobs, and most of them serve both halves at once.
- Keyword research, so you know what people actually type.
- Adverts and campaign structure on the paid side.
- Pages worth landing on, whichever side sent the visitor.
- Technical health, so a search engine can read the site at all.
- Measurement, so you can tell an enquiry from a visit.
- Reporting that changes a decision rather than filling a slide.
Notice that only one of those six belongs to advertising alone. That overlap is the real argument for running search engine marketing as one programme instead of two.
How the paid half works
The top slot does not simply go to the highest bidder. A search engine ranks the candidates on what they bid and on how relevant each one looks. Your bid works as a ceiling rather than a price, so what you pay depends on the competition. Each platform sets its own rules, and those rules change, so check the current documentation for whichever engine you use.
Relevance is the lever most people ignore. A tighter advert on a matching page usually holds a better position for less money. The engine wants a result the searcher will click, so it rewards the match. The mechanics of that auction sit in how Google Ads works, and what moves the price sits in cost per click.
How the organic half works
Free listings run on a slower loop. A search engine crawls your pages, decides what each one covers, and weighs it against everything else it holds on the subject.
None of that happens quickly. Yet the effect compounds. A page that earns its place keeps working while you sleep, and the next visit from it carries no click cost.
Choosing the split between paid and organic
There is no fixed ratio, and anybody who offers you one is guessing. Instead, decide by what you need from the next few months.
| Question | Paid half | Organic half |
|---|---|---|
| Speed | Live when you switch it on | Slow, and not on a schedule you set |
| If you stop investing | Visits stop when the budget stops | Visits usually continue for a while |
| Cost of a visit | You pay for every click | No charge per click once it ranks |
| Control of the wording | You choose the advert and the page | The engine decides what to show |
| Best suited to | Testing demand quickly | Owning a phrase for years |
Most businesses need both eventually. In practice the order matters. If demand exists and you can afford the clicks, start paid, learn what converts, then feed that into the pages you want to rank.
Which search engine deserves the budget
Start with the one your customers actually use. In most markets that is Google. Check your own analytics rather than trusting a figure you read somewhere. A small budget spread across two platforms teaches you less than the same budget on one.
Once the first account produces steady enquiries, testing a second engine is reasonable. Some categories cost less there, simply because fewer competitors bother with it.
What search engine marketing costs
The click price is not the cost. What matters is what an enquiry costs, and then what a customer costs, since most clicks become neither.
Work that chain out before you spend anything. It is ordinary arithmetic, and it decides whether the channel is viable at all.
A worked example, with round numbers chosen to keep the sums easy rather than to describe a typical result. Say a hundred clicks cost two hundred, so a click costs two. Ten of those hundred visitors enquire, which puts an enquiry at twenty. If one enquiry in four becomes a customer, a customer costs eighty. Whether that works depends entirely on what a customer is worth to you.
Do the same sum for the free half. Estimate the hours or the fee, then set it against the visits those pages could hold over time. The two halves rarely cost the same per enquiry, and that gap is your budget decision.
Measuring search engine marketing without fooling yourself
Two numbers decide almost everything. What does an enquiry cost, and how many enquiries turn into work? Everything else is diagnosis.
Set up measurement before you spend, not after. A campaign with no conversion tracking can only report traffic, and traffic is the number that flatters you most.
Then read the report of the terms people actually typed, rather than the keyword list you built. Most ad platforms call it a search terms report. Half an hour there usually catches more waste than a month of dashboards.
Do not count the same enquiry twice
Paid and organic both claim the visits they touched. If you add the two reports together, your total will beat reality. Pick one place to count enquiries, ideally the enquiry itself, and treat every platform report as a clue rather than a verdict.
Where search engine marketing leaks money
Waste is rarely exotic. The same handful of leaks turns up again and again.
- Broad keyword matching with no negative list behind it.
- Clicks arriving on a homepage instead of a page about the thing.
- Location settings that reach people well outside the area you serve.
- Extra networks or placements running that nobody deliberately chose.
- Too many campaigns for the budget, so none of them learns anything.
- Free pages written around a phrase nobody types.
None of that is interesting work. Still, all of it matters more than the bidding strategy you were about to change.
When search engine marketing is the wrong priority
Sometimes the honest answer is to spend the money elsewhere. Three situations make that plain.
Nobody searches for what you sell, because the category has no name people use yet. Your margin cannot carry the click price in your auction. Or you already capture every search in your area, so more spend buys nothing new.
There is a fourth case, and it is the common one. If you cannot answer the phone or deliver the work, more enquiries make things worse. Fix capacity first, then buy demand.
How the two halves of search engine marketing help each other
They feed each other when you let them. Advert copy that wins clicks tells you which words a page should use. A page that ranks tells you where adverts are no longer necessary.
Similarly, the paid half can hold a position while the free half catches up. Running both on one phrase is not automatically waste, since a searcher scanning the page is choosing anyway. Whether it pays for your phrases is testable rather than theoretical. Our piece on paid search goes further into that trade.
A sensible first ninety days
Start narrow and finish with evidence. The plan below suits almost any business with real demand behind it.
- Write down the phrases a buyer would type, not the ones you would.
- Check that people search for them, and drop the ones nobody uses.
- Fix measurement, so an enquiry counts once and counts properly.
- Build one page for each service you genuinely want more of.
- Run a small paid campaign on the clearest phrases only.
- Read the search terms report weekly and add negatives.
- Feed whatever converts into the pages you want ranking for free.
After ninety days you know two things. You know what an enquiry costs, and you know which phrases are worth owning. Those two answers beat any tool you could buy.
Frequently asked questions
Is search engine marketing the same as PPC?
Not quite, although plenty of people use the two terms for the same work. Pay per click describes how you pay, which is per click, and it happens on social platforms as well as search engines. Search engine marketing describes where the work happens, which is the search results page. In everyday use, a quote for it almost always means adverts on a search engine. Ask which half the price covers before you agree to anything.
Does search engine marketing include SEO?
It depends who you ask, which is exactly why the question is worth asking out loud. The broad definition covers everything that wins you space on a results page, paid or free, so search engine optimisation sits inside it. The narrow definition covers advertising only. Neither reading is wrong. What matters is that your contract names which pages, which adverts and which reporting you are paying for.
How long before it starts working?
The paid half can work the day you switch it on, because your advert enters the auction straight away. The free half is slower. A search engine has to crawl your pages. Then it weighs them against everything else it holds on the subject. Nobody can give you a firm date for that, and anybody who does is guessing. That gap is the main reason businesses run both. Paid covers the wait while the slower work matures.
Do I need both halves at once?
Usually not on day one. Running both well takes more attention than most small teams have. So pick the half that answers your biggest unknown. If you do not know what an enquiry costs, a small paid campaign tells you within weeks. If you already know the number and it is affordable, the pages are the better long term investment. Search engine marketing works either way round, as long as you finish what you start.
What does search engine marketing cost?
There is no single price, and anybody quoting one without seeing your auction is guessing. Cost has two parts. Money goes to the search engine, and a fee goes to whoever does the work. Neither part matters on its own. Work out what an enquiry costs you and what a customer is worth, then judge search engine marketing against those two numbers rather than against the click price.
Why can I not see my own advert when I search for it?
Your own searches are a poor test, so do not judge a campaign by them. An auction runs on every search. What you see depends on location, device, history and the budget left for the day. Repeatedly searching for your own advert also records impressions you never intended. Use the account reporting to see whether the advert showed and what it cost. That answers the question properly, and it costs you nothing.
How do I know whether it is working?
Count enquiries rather than visits, then compare what one costs against what it is worth. Traffic can climb while the phone stays quiet. Give the comparison a fair window too. Enquiries often arrive days after the click. A week against the week before will mislead you if spend has just changed. Compare equal periods, and wait until enough has happened for the number to mean anything.
Can I run search engine marketing myself?
Yes, and plenty of owners do it well, particularly when the business sells one clear service. The parts that need real care are measurement, negative keywords and the landing page. Search engine marketing punishes neglect rather than inexperience, so an account nobody reads will waste money whoever built it. If you cannot look at it weekly, either hire somebody or run something smaller.
Should I keep paying for adverts once a page ranks for free?
Test it rather than assume. Pause the adverts on that phrase for a few weeks and watch total enquiries, not just the paid ones. If the free listing absorbs most of the demand, you have found a saving. If total enquiries drop, the two were adding up rather than overlapping. Search engine marketing rewards this kind of small experiment far more than it rewards a confident opinion.