Discover This Year's Top SEM Companies

SEM is a marketing strategy that helps your business grow by increasing your company’s visibility in SERPs through different tactics, such as SEO and paid advertising options like PPC.

An SEM agency is a group of digital marketing experts that help brands strategize and improve their presence in online search engines through various tactics. These agencies often consist of multiple teams of specialists, including those who deal with paid ads, organic results, content, and more.

An SEM agency works with companies to help them build brand awareness, create a lead generation strategy, and optimize their search rankings to earn more revenue.

SERPs are the pages listed in search results for any given search query. For example, if you search for “flower shops in Harrisburg,” you’ll see these results:

Generally, search engine results start with paid ads. These appear above organic listings and usually appear with “Sponsored” tags. Organic results follow these results.

So what’s the difference between the different kinds of results that you find on SERPs?

• PPC ads: These results are above organic results because the companies pay to rank for keywords. PPC ads can appear at the top of SERPs, on the right-hand side of search results with images, or as text results above organic results. You can determine that these first few results are ads because they’ll have a small “sponsored” tag before their URL.
• Google Business Profile listings: These results also show up above organic results and are the product of local SEO strategies. Local SEO is a sub-category of SEO that allows you to market specifically to your geographic location. Each listing shows their ratings, location, and phone number. Sometimes they also include a review and hours of operation.
• Organic results: These results are the product of a fantastic SEM campaign that incorporates Google’s different criteria — how beneficial the content is to a user if the page is user-friendly, the number of backlinks a website has, keywords targeted, and more. These results are unpaid and selected by Google.

Ranking highly in SERPs is essential for increasing visitors to your website, growing your business, and boosting revenue via SEM.

In fact, 86% of all organic clicks goes to the first 10 websites in search results. That means there’s only a 24% chance that users will get to the second page of results.

The lower you rank, the less people will see your website. The fewer clicks you get to your website, the less business you get. If your competition ranks at the top while you rank on the second page of SERPs, it’s almost a no-brainer that they’ll surpass you in sales.

Simply put, ranking highly in SERPs is necessary if you want your customers to visit your website and make a purchase.

On average, SMBs spend $9000 to $10,000 per month on SEM, which includes ad spend and management costs. However, the amount your company spends will depend on various factors, including:

• Your ad spend budget
• Your SEM agency
• Your SEM strategies
• Your campaign’s scale
• Your industry
• And more!

Now that you know why SEM is essential to your business revenue and growth, let’s talk about finding the best SEM company.

Here’s what you should look for when evaluating the best SEM companies for your organization:

1. High-quality work

You want an SEM company that practices what they preach. That means when you search for an SEM company, they should show up highly in search results, have fresh content, have a professional and organized website, be mobile responsive, etc.

The best SEM companies exude the same quality and provide the same results for themselves as they would provide for you. You can determine this by looking around their website to learn more about their process, campaign characteristics, and what you’ll get when you work with them.

You can also determine the quality of an SEM company by reading their informational resources to see if they’re well-read in the strategies they’ll serve you if you become their client.

2. Lots of testimonials

Testimonials are a great way to show potential customers how you’ve served satisfied customers and what loyal customers love about your company.

This element is crucial. Testimonials come from people like you who were looking for SEM services in the past. They were in your shoes, and now, they’re providing feedback from the other side of the fence — as a customer.

You should look to see that the SEM company you’re considering has at least 100 testimonials to show that they’re a fantastic company and provide great results for their clients.

3. Attention to your goals

The top SEM companies will consider your goals and make them their own. You can get a feel for whether an SEM company will do so by chatting on the phone to learn their process.

One of the first questions they should ask is what your goals are for your campaign. These questions help them determine if they can fulfill the goals you want to accomplish, and it gives you a chance to ensure they offer what you’re looking for.

If the SEM company doesn’t ask questions about your industry, business, or overall campaign goals, they’re probably not the best to work with. It’s their job to learn about your company so that they can best serve you.

4. Industry knowledge or research

Along with considering your goals, the top SEM companies will immerse themselves in your industry to understand what products and services you offer, who your competition is, what keywords would be best to target, and so on.

The best SEM companies will have a passion for getting to know and understand your company to help you outrank your competition, recommend the best, most valuable strategies, and accomplish your overall marketing goals.

5. An expansive portfolio

One of the best ways to see if an SEM company is worth working with is to look at their portfolio or case studies of other companies they’ve worked with.

These show real-life occurrences of businesses working with the SEM company and show what kind of results they can drive, what strategies they used to do so, how long it took to complete, and more.

With this kind of information, you’ll get a feel for whether their work is impressive or if their portfolio doesn’t quite impress you.

SEM is a complex strategy that has a lot of moving parts. If you’re looking for SEM services, you’re likely already busy running your own company — ordering inventory, writing checks, keeping your location clean, and managing your employees.

For SEM to work, you must successfully manage strategies, including SEO and PPC, which can take lots of training to do successfully. Hiring a company that can accomplish your SEM goals for you is much easier and more time efficient.

They’ll implement SEO and PPC strategies and track the results so that you know exactly when you need to tweak a process, target a different keyword, or change up your content.

With so many moving parts, hiring a top SEM company is almost always more beneficial than trying to accomplish all your marketing goals in-house.

Deciding on the best SEM company for your business can be overwhelming. However, there are a few key things that you should consider before signing any contracts.

Here are a few essential points to consider:

Budget

Start by setting a budget and sticking to it. This step will help you weed through SEM companies quickly since you can eliminate ones that surpass your marketing budget.

Do your research before choosing how much you want to spend on your SEM campaign so that you set a reasonable budget. For example, suppose you want a PPC campaign, a custom SEO campaign, custom content, and a user-experience expert. In that case, you should incorporate all necessary costs into your budget.

Setting a realistic budget saves you frustration since you’ll already know how much the services you’re looking for will cost you.

Location

Location won’t be a deciding factor for everyone, but it’s something to consider.

If you prefer meeting in person once a quarter to talk about your SEM strategy or even every month to discuss the progress of your campaign, the location of your top SEM company is something to consider.

If you plan on meeting with your strategist often, you’ll want to rule out any companies too far away — like international SEM companies — to ensure that travel is easy for yourself and your strategist.

Offerings

You should never settle for a top SEM company that doesn’t offer all the strategies you’re looking for. You know your business best, and if there’s a strategy that you’re interested in, be sure to find an SEM company that offers it.

Most SEM companies will have a long list of offerings, so this shouldn’t be an issue for many, but be sure to check before signing any contracts.

Personality

Personality is another factor to consider when deciding on a top SEM company.

Be sure to talk on the phone and not just via email or chat before signing any contracts. It’s important to see how you mesh with your specialist and the company.

If you don’t have meaningful conversations about your business, or the company doesn’t seem interested in your marketing goals, you can probably check them off your list. You can only learn some information by speaking on the phone, so it’s essential to do so before committing to an SEM company.

Here are some of the leading tips and tactics for doing SEM for your business:

• Create quality content: Make sure your organic and paid content is optimized for the user experience and SERPs.
• Do keyword research: Find what users are searching for and figure out how to work those terms into your content.
• Target a specific audience: Consider who your audience is to figure out the information they are looking for.
• Optimize your landing pages: Make sure that when people land on your website, whether through ads or organic results, they know where to look next.
• Monitor analytics: Stay up on your website’s performance and make sure that you aren’t losing traffic or results.

Remember, working with a top SEM agency means you have a team of experts to help you execute these strategies to their full potential!