With the ever rising global population growth, one would think that businesses are having a field day and you will be quite right. The audience to market to has increased tremendously, thanks to the internet.  However, because of the rise in population and better global internet connectivity, more and more entrepreneurs have also joined the business realm—so much so that anyone, anywhere in the world with a computer and internet, can decide to launch a product or service today and succeed in doing so in a few hours.

According to Ottawa Business Daily—an online magazine that provides businesses in Ottawa with the most effective and affordable opportunities to boost the advertising reach in Canada's national capital region—the  bigger market and extra competitiveness has given online businesses’ and edge over  traditional brick and mortar businesses that do not have an online presence. This also implies that to succeed in today’s world of business, businesses must market themselves very well online.  And to accomplish this, they have to perfect their Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Search engine Optimization efforts.

SEO involves having a website, Blog, newsletters etc that has been strategically prepared using keywords that help search engines lead online surfers to them. SEM, on the other hand, is all about paid adverts to online search engines like Google, Yahoo, Yandex etc.  There are several advantages for using this approach over SEO.  Here are the main advantages:

1. Direct response marketing- Simply put SEM encourages the ads’audience to take action and  advertisers are only charged for taking the desired action. In other words, it is great for traffic generation, leads generation or sales. 
2. Better ROI on the advertiser- Because the ads are precision targeted, there is a better likelihood that advert clicks turn into sales or other anticipated outcomes desired by the advertiser.  The reason is online searchers, use keywords to search and these are converted into measurable metrics which in turn helps advertisers pin-point their likelihood audience.  It is often said success is when opportunity meets preparation and this is exactly what happens in SEM.
3. SEM increases Brand awareness-According to Google,  SEM can increase brand awareness by up to 80%. And marketers know that good brand awareness often results in sales in the long run.  That is why sometimes an advertisement can be repeated so many times on TV, Radio etc. The aim is create brand awareness.  For example CNN has very good brand awareness for being a prime news channel.   The English premier league is another example.  Scores of people worldwide often tune to this league for the best soccer.
4. SEM is not costly- Putting an ad on Google can cost as little as $5 while doing the same on TV, involves thousands of dollars. So advertisers with smaller budgets are better able to build their brands and sales online just as well as the bigger spenders.
5. Consistent Traffic- SEM is great because it’s keyword and region based. Depending on the advert placement, all searchers that meet the set search criteria will see the ad. 

These are merely some of the main benefits of SEM, brought to you courtesy of Ottawa Business Daily, Ottawa’s best business trends magazine.  Subscribe to this online magazine for more business tips and trends.