Search engine marketing is becoming a norm now, and it has huge potential to reach the target audience effectively. Many strategies, techniques, tools, and tips could help businesses increase engagement and online presence.

However, with huge numbers of competitors and companies in the market, it’s becoming difficult to stand out and succeed in search engine marketing.

With SEM, businesses can increase visitors to websites and generate more leads. Marketers consider it one of the best strategies to increase their clientele and reach new customers. 

It’s important to grow organically by using techniques such as SEO but ranking on SERPs could be difficult if you rely on only one strategy. The success of a business is not dependent on opening an Instagram page or building a website. 

It’s more than that. With SEM technologies, website owners can increase engagement, leads, and conversion rates. But how are you going to use that? Don’t worry, I got you. I’m going to share the top 10 SEM tools with advanced features that every business needs. These tools are essential if you want to boost your business.

What is Search Engine Marketing?

Before discussing SEM tools let’s understand what SEM is. SEM is a digital marketing strategy in which paid ads are strategically made for the business. With these ads, visibility on SERP increases, and the website gets more engagement.

It generally includes paid search ads. These ads appear on the top or end of the Google search engine page. These can be further personalized according to the following;

• The search term of your audience
• Demographics of customers 
• Different targeting parameters

The goal of search marketing is to increase the exposure of your website. Once more people will know about your website, it’s a given they will get more interested in your offer.

Is SEM Important For My Business?

The simple answer is yes, it is important. Every business owner wonders whether SEM is important for their business or not. If we dive deeper into SEM, you will learn that with SEM, you can reach your target audience more accurately. 

With organic strategies becoming number one in search engine rankings might take weeks or even months to reach visibility. But SEM will effectively increase your rankings in minimum time.

If you want to keep track of your SEM campaigns and the progress of your website visibility, then SEM tools are of great importance. You can make adjustments based on the campaign performance to improve the results.

Types of SEM Tools

There are different types of SEM tools for every business. Every tool has its unique specifications, which help improve your SEM strategy. Some of the most common SEM tools used by marketers are as follows.

Keyword Research Tools

Your audience searches for service, product, or information by typing a specific keyword. With keyword research tools, you can identify these keywords and get keyword ideas, and the process becomes much smoother afterward. 

Businesses use these profitable keywords in their content, website, or relevant data to increase their visibility. With keyword research tools you can identify mainly two types of keywords, i.e., high-traffic and low-competition. Both are different and are used according to relevancy. Some of the most commonly used keyword research tools are;

• Google Keyword Planner
• SEMrush
• Ahrefs

How To Use These?

You must start by finding the keywords to use keyword research tools effectively. These can be the phrases or relevant keywords to your product or services. Afterward, you need to list keywords based on high and low competition. 

Your advertising campaign is focused on these keywords. After finding target keywords, businesses use them in their ad copy, blog posts, landing pages, and other content to improve click-through rates.

Ad Creation & Optimization Tools

Creating ads is an essential part of SEM strategy. If you don’t do this part effectively, then it’s likely that your SEM campaign will not be successful. With ad creation and optimization tools, you can craft a compelling message that resonates with your customers. 

These tools have many features such as A/B testing, ad copy improvements, and changes in ad copy and performance. Some of the popular tools used for this purpose are;

• Google Ads Editor
• AdWords Performance Grader
• Optmyzr

How To Use These?

To create your ad, remember that your ad copy is worth a lot. It should connect with your audience and make them feel special. With SEM tools, you should experiment with different ad variations. Then you should check which ad is showing the highest ROI. 

This data is essential for making new ads even in the future. Your future campaigns can be much better if you keep optimizing your ads and analyze the current ads’ performance. 

Analytics & Tracking Tools

You have created a compelling ad copy and now clicked on the run campaign. But what’s next is the most essential part. It keeps track of your ad campaign.

 With SEM tools, you can get real-time analysis of your ad performance. With these tools, you can check various factors such as clicks, impressions, conversion rate, and metrics. Some of the essential tracking tools for SEM are as follow;

• Google Analytics
• Adobe Analytics
• Kissmetrics.

How To Use These?

Businesses must set up conversion tracking on their websites. This will help in increasing the performance of their ad campaigns. With these tools identifying the areas of improvement becomes much more accessible. 

Competitor Analysis Tools

If you think your job here is done, then you are mistaken. The most important part is yet incomplete. It is analyzing the strategies of your competitors. You can’t outperform them if you have no idea what they are up to. That’s why you must focus on learning what they are up to. 

With these tools, you can learn more about how much your competitors spend on ads, the keywords they rank for, and many more important things. By understanding these, you can also adjust your SEM strategy accordingly and even improve it. Some popular tools for this purpose are;

• SpyFu
• SEMrush
• AdBeat.

How To Use These?

Firstly you need to identify your top competitors and check their strategies. You can check their keywords, such as high-volume or low-competition keywords. You can use a similar keyword with lesser competition to increase your reach. 

Remember, it’s about finding the strategies of your competitors, seeing the mistakes they are making and what points they are missing, and optimizing your ad according to that information.

What Are The Best Search Engine Marketing Tools?

By now you might have a clear idea about SEM tools and how important they are for your business. You can’t just make an ad copy do some research, and then launch your SEM campaign.

Because that’s not how you will achieve success in an SEM campaign.

You need a solid strategy that aligns with your marketing goals. You need knowledge of appropriate tools that guarantee to increase your SEM campaign performance. But choosing a suitable tool for an SEM campaign is not an easy task in itself.

That’s why I’m here to help you navigate the best tool for your SEM campaign. There are several choices; you only need to find the most suitable for your business. I will share the top 10 SEM tools that can be a huge game-changer for your SEM campaign.

1. HubSpot’s Ad Tracking Software

With the HubSpot Ads tool, you can understand how your ads impact your target audience. It gives you the experience of how the buyer’s journey is going, and it dives much deeper into the SEM campaign.

Moreover, you will also get information about website traffic and click analytics. You can also check the effectiveness of your SEM campaign and leverage your marketing goals by adopting the right strategy. You will also get many benefits from HubSpot’s ad-tracking software.

• Automating the ad targeting which helps understand the ad campaign progress. It makes a list that aligns with your audience and generates more leads.
• You can run ad campaigns on social media channels like Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google.
• It gives you a summary of all the leads and ROI from the sites on which you advertise. These sites can be Google, LinkedIn, etc.
• It understands the psychology and behavior of your audience. It does that by understanding the intention and behavior of people who acted on the ad.

2.SEMrush

SEM is incomplete without this tool. With SEMrush, online marketers can easily make a strong and unbeatable campaign. This tool serves for a lot of things, such as doing extensive keyword research for SEM, tracking the progress of your keyword ranking, audits of competitor backlinks, link building, your website audit, analyzing the source of traffic, and page analytics.

You might be wondering how it can help you improve your SEM campaign. Here are five ways SEMRush can help you in optimizing your SEM campaign with competitive analysis.

• Identify high-value keyword
• Find the best and top-performing ad copy of your competitors.
• Finding the strategies of how your competitors are converting paid traffic
• Analyzing the visual ad creatives of your competitors
• Finding strengths and weaknesses of your competitors. Finding the best competition keywords.

3. Google Trends

You can easily find the phrases trending on Google and not performing well by Google trends. You have the flexibility to choose a certain keyword and traffic analysis relevant to that Keyword in;

• Specific location
• Language
• Time

No one wants to invest time and money in something that’s unpopular or has no target audience. With Google Trends, you can ensure that you invest your money in the right direction.

It’s an excellent tool for e-commerce businesses as they generally want to find the popularity of a product for a region. If you make your SEM strategy in areas where the product is trending, the chances of making sales are much higher.

4.Keywordtool.io

This tool provides you with primary keywords and also gives you phrases that are relevant to that keyword. With this tool, you can get a long list of keywords for your ad copy and online ads.

If you are skeptical about any keyword, you can add it to the Google search trends to check its popularity and analyze whether it’s a good keyword. With this keyword tool, you can create thousands of keywords for your ad. It’s a highly important and effective tool that almost every marketer uses.

• You can generate more than 700 keywords.
• You can generate keywords from various search engines such as Bing, Google, Instagram, Amazon, eBay, play store, etc.

5. Google Ads Keyword Planner

You have a lot of keywords, but if you don’t keep track of them, then it’s likely that your strategy will fail. With Google keywords planner, you can maintain all the keywords and their performance.

This handy tool lets you find the most suitable keywords for your business. With Google Planner, you will also get a range of bidding for every keyword. So it also gives you a clear idea about how much budget you need for your SEM campaign.

You can choose the keywords which fit within your budget. After identifying your specific keywords, you can run ads directly from the program.

6.SpyFu

If you aren’t gaining significant results from your SEO strategy and AdWords effort, this SEM tool is a must-try. With this tool, you can get a list of the best competitive keywords for your business and eliminate all the unnecessary and irrelevant keywords.

Remember that keyword research is something that needs trial and error. You need to learn from your competitor’s mistakes and minimize these mistakes in your campaigns. SpyFu will complete the research of the website domain for you and give you a list of important metrics.

• It will give you a list of effective keywords for which a specific domain is ranking. It can be either due to their SEO or PPC efforts.
• You can see Adwords keywords that the company bought. The keyword searches for which they rank and get organic traffic. It also gives ad variants of the domain used for at least 12 years.

7. Unbounce

You can spend millions on finding the ideal keyword and making a compelling copy. But none of that will matter if your landing page is not optimized. Because the individuals who open the landing page will not get convinced, and all the money will go to waste.

But Unbounce is a helpful tool and with its aid, you don’t have to worry about your landing page. Because with its help, you can create high-converting landing pages.

The best part is that you don’t need to have any coding skills. You can even set up A/B tests and track the performance to determine which landing page performs well. But that’s not all. Unbounce can help you in a lot of other things, which include;

• Creating responsive, optimized landing pages in minimum time without any coding skills. You can create it with a drag-and-drop builder.
• You can find a suitable template from hundreds of premade templates on the SEM tool. It also allows you to copy-paste between pages and import the content directly.
• Run A/B split tests which are helpful in finding which page variant is performing best.
• With a script manager, you can check analytics, track all the goals, and retarget scripts across different pages of websites with just one click.
• You can integrate it with different third-party tools, i.e., HubSpot.

8. Answer the Public

It is a simple and easy-to-use tool for keyword research. It can help you in paid search, search engine optimization, and formulating other content strategies. With this SEM tool, users can analyze a keyword. Moreover, you can see the percentage of people asking a question across Google.

For example, If you search for the phrase ‘digital marketing strategy.‘ Then you will get a visually appealing diagram that shows all the keywords relevant to digital marketing strategy.

It will also give you more insights and keywords, such as ‘best digital marketing strategy for startups, ‘ which shows us the intent behind the keyword. However, there are only a limited number of free searches on Answer the Public. But you can access the premium package, which includes many additional features that make this SEM tool worth using in the campaigns.

9. Microsoft Clarity

You have a perfect website that’s built professionally. But how can you know how your audience is interacting with it?

This problem is sorted with Microsoft Clarity, an SEM tool used to check how visitors react to the information on your landing pages. If you have a limited budget, this is a suitable tool because it’s free and provided by Microsoft. With this, you can analyze how people react to your website by getting data in the form of;

• Valuable insights
• Heatmaps
• Session recordings

It is one of the best and most user-friendly powerful tools in the list of SEM tools. You can get a clear idea of how users interact with your website. With session recordings, you can see how the user is taking action on your website, which is happening in real time.

Heatmap visualizes the clicks on the website and paid landing pages. This information is extremely important for developers because, based on this feedback, they can make further improvements to the website.

10.WordStream

It is an advertising management tool. With its help, you can do all the research, measure, and optimize your ads to create the best ads. With it, you can reduce the time needed for campaign management and focus on other important tasks.

Another important thing about this all-in-one tool is WordStream Advisor. With its help, you can activate an important feature, the “20 Minute Work Week” workflow. It includes at least 9 items that are fully defined. By the name, you can already tell that with its help, you can;

• Optimize your account
• A detailed report
• Create new ad creatives

With this SEM tool, you can also check the progress of your PPC campaign. It will also give you keyword suggestions on how you can improve your campaigns. Other than that, you can build campaigns, and search various keywords.

It includes positive and negative keywords and adjusts the campaign according to your budget. Another fascinating thing about this platform is that with its help, you can create landing pages and make overview reports of your conversion rate and call data.

Tips For Using SEM Tools

Your digital marketing efforts can become more fruitful if you use SEM tools. However, I will share some incredible tips that will increase the effectiveness of your SEM tools and make your campaign more effective.

• Check your advertising budget regularly and identify the SEM method showing you extremely effective results.
• Keep track of all the advancements and technological innovations in SEM areas. It includes Google ads, PPC, etc. Afterward, create a customized and optimized strategy according to the latest developments.
• If one tool isn’t working for your business, that doesn’t mean it’s entirely useless. Try another tool and keep experimenting until you find the ideal tool for your business.
• Don’t forget to optimize your ads according to the mobile. Because a large number of people use mobile, and by not making your ads mobile-friendly, you are missing out.
• If you are promoting to local customers, then try geo-targeting. If you run it effectively, then there is a high chance that local people will see your sponsored website ad.

Advantages of Using SEM Tools

This list of tools is highly beneficial for every business and is a crucial part of online marketing strategies. However, here are some of the most common benefits due to which marketers highly recommend SEM.

• Attracts Target Audience: SEM tools increase online visibility and website traffic. The search engine pages start showing on the search engine pages, so more people become interested in the offer.
• Personalized Experience For Customers: With SEM tools, you can tailor your ad to the target audience. It includes your audience’s likes, location, how they reach you, and much more. That’s why it yields high results.
• No Need To Spend A Lot Of Money: An extremely important feature of SEM tools is that there is a controlled budget. It is done by setting a specific bid price limit and budget. So you will only pay for clicks and impressions relevant to your industry.
• Extremely ROI Driven: If you are a business owner who focuses on ROI, then this is a suitable strategy you should implement. ROI is improved by optimizing the ad campaign, which makes SEM campaign a huge success.

Let Professionals Assist You With SEM

These search engine marketing tools are extremely important for any business to increase its online presence and maximize the results from its advertising strategy. On top of that, this strategy is highly ROI driven.

It opens countless opportunities for businesses to improve their performance and achieve online marketing goals easily. You only need the right strategy and SEM tools to make your business successful in the digital landscape.

But often, people find SEM extremely difficult. One of the main reasons is that despite using SEM tools and applying strategies, they lack the expertise, experience, and skill needed to achieve SEM goals.

But don’t worry EchoFish is here to help you and drive your business to success. So contact us right now and reduce the time needed to become successful in the digital landscape. Contact us right now.