Search data is an invaluable source of insight into consumer intent and behavior. It’s quite literally people communicating the things that interest them. Taken in aggregate, those insights can point to trends and changing tastes, which can inform content creation both on your websites and in other online channels. Those insights can also provide useful information to support other marketing initiatives.  

Generally, as marketers and SEO professionals, when we think about organic search optimization, we tend to think about Google primarily, followed closely by other traditional search engines as the best sources for search traffic and trend data. However, as the world’s most heavily trafficked online video sharing platform, YouTube is one of the world’s largest search engines and should be part of any search insights research effort. 

What can we Learn from YouTube Search Trends?

Video is a go-to source for consumers. It encompasses diverse topics and lends itself well to instructional content. Consider a few key facts about video, according to Wordstream:

• “Social video generates 1200% more shares than text and image content combined
• 96% of people have watched an explainer video to learn more about a product or service
• 51% of marketing professionals worldwide name video as the type of content with the best ROI
• Marketers who use video grow revenue 49% faster than non-video users.”

Because video is an effective, favored format by both consumers and businesses, AND accounts for a high volume of searches, it offers valuable perspective to content creators and the brands they represent on which topics, themes, and keywords they can leverage for both long-range brand development content and in-the-moment marketing opportunities. It also provides useful information to SEO professionals to help them optimize existing video metadata to better capture interest from relevant searches.

Indirectly, YouTube search trends – because they reflect consumer intent and behavior more universally – can help inform marketing more broadly, from advertising to social media to event promotion and beyond.   

Can you use YouTube Search Trends to Optimize Videos?

Yes, and then some.

Much in the same way you can use Google search trends to optimize copy and graphic content, you can learn from YouTube search trends to optimize videos. For starters, you can see which topics, themes and even search terms are getting the most attention and ranking highest in YouTube search. With that information you can: 

1. Plan new video content 

Visitors to YouTube watch more than one billion hours of video every day. They come to be entertained, informed, and instructed. However wide or narrow your message or area of expertise, chances are high that someone is looking for what you have to say. But just because you have a message that someone is looking for doesn’t mean that they will find your video or that it will answer the specific questions they have. 

That’s where YouTube search trend data can help you. First, by understanding the unique and specific keywords searchers are using to find content, you can better produce video content relevant to the searches. This improves your chances of YouTube surfacing your video in related searches and improves the chances that someone searching for that info will watch a greater portion of your video. This is important, because watch time is a central ranking factor for YouTube search. As your video accrues more watch time, its chances of ranking high in search results improves.

Secondly, YouTube search data gives you key insights to optimize the content surrounding your video: Title, description, still images, embedded graphics and more. 

2. Optimize existing video content 

Videos can be costly and time consuming to produce, so it’s not unusual to think of an existing video as a static piece of content that can’t be changed. That is too limited a view, though. At a minimum, without changing any of the content of a video, it’s possible to optimize the video metadata to perform better in search. This is not about gaming the system, because the content must be useful and relevant to the audience. By using YouTube search insights you do a better job presenting and describing the video in a way that aligns with the search data and the searcher’s intent. If you have a great video about how to knit a sweater, it might not perform well in the U.K. where a sweater is better known as a jumper. The content is still good, but a change to the title might help it perform better.

At times, the search insights may be overwhelming enough to merit greater changes either to the text elements of the video or to the video itself. They may even merit re-producing the video entirely. YouTube search insights can help you make the business case for making more dramatic changes to an existing video.

3. Prioritize multi-channel initiatives related to the topic or theme 

Knowing what people are interested in, how they search for it and what topics they commit time to has value beyond the channel. YouTube search insights – especially because of the critical mass of traffic YouTube attracts – can be indicative of larger trends and behaviors. That information can lend direction to your overall content strategy across other online and offline properties whether it be advertising, organic social media, or educational content, for example.

Is there Seasonality Behind YouTube Search Trends?

Like any consumer trend, there is seasonality to YouTube search trends. In simple terms, we can think of the seasonality on two levels:

1. Traditional Seasonality

Traditional seasonality refers to search trends that ebb and flow based on broad seasons, such as travel seasons, holidays, sports, and events (e.g., wedding or concert season).  

2. Micro Seasonality

Micro seasonality refers to short-lived trends tied to current events, such as election day, a flood, or an episode of Saturday Night Live. YouTube search data can help you identify seasons so you can prioritize your content development to better align with the opportunity.

How does the YouTube algorithm Work?

The closest thing to official guidance on how the YouTube algorithm works is captured in the Google publication entitled “Deep Neural Networks for YouTube Recommendations,” but in reality, there is a lot of debate about what factors into a rank and the weight of any one factor in awarding a search rank. Generally, there is consensus on the following:

• Audience Retention. Remember when we said, above, that watch time is an important ranking factor? This is one component of Audience Retention. Google’s retention analysis also looks at “average view duration” or how much of a video does someone watch on average. It does this along four “types of moments” for your videos including intros, continuous segments, spikes, and dips, which measure engagement with the video content
• Engagement. Beyond how viewers engage with the video itself, Google measures related engagement such as video comments, subscribers, video shares, click-through rate, and sentiment (thumbs up or down). 
• Channel Authority. Audience Retention and Engagement tell Google how viewers regard your content and are factors in your channel authority. How the video performs in search (both on YouTube and in referral traffic from other search engines), how many authoritative sources link to your content, the age and relevance of your content and other traditional SEO ranking factors also help determine your channel authority.
• Keyword Targeting. Just like with SEO in Google and other search engines, YouTube’s algorithm relies on broad match keyword targeting, and to a lesser extent, exact match keyword targeting. In short, while Audience Retention, Engagement and Channel Authority reflect to what extent users find your content relevant and useful, how you present and describe your videos – title, description, keyword tags – are important to tell YouTube what your video is about and is a key element of how to get your YouTube video seen.   

Relevant keywords are very important in the early going with videos; as the video begins to accumulate watch time, keyword importance takes a back seat to watch time. According to Search Engine Journal, YouTube “…continues to use metadata to index your video correctly and rank it initially. To maximize your presence in YouTube search and suggested videos, you still need to make sure your metadata is well-optimized. This includes your video’s title, description, and tags.”

How to Leverage YouTube Search Trends

To make use of YouTube search data, you first need to access and understand the data. Here are a few tools to help you do that.

Google Trends

Google Trends is a great place to start to research YouTube trends. While Google Trends doesn’t show actual search volume for a specific query (it normalizes data to show relative popularity of a search term) it does make it easy to find the most searched topics on YouTube and understand interest in a particular topic. 

At the beginning of the pandemic, there was a well-publicized run-on toilet paper. Perhaps you picked up some tips on how to score a roll or two of toilet paper during the lean times and now, as a content creator, you want to decide if it would be worth creating a video to share your tips. In this case, Google Trends indicates that interest in toilet paper has waned since the peak of the shortage, but interest remains high. 

In the example search here, we’ve set the parameters to worldwide search trends over the past 12 months in all categories across YouTube. These parameters can be changed to better suit your particular focus, and you can compare topics to help you settle on the best one to create content around. 

BrightEdge and BrightEdge Instant

Built into the BrightEdge SEO platform is the ability to track specific keywords and topics over time or to search keywords and topics on an ad hoc basis. While that basic functionality doesn’t extend to YouTube, specifically, it can be limited to Google Video results, a majority of which are YouTube results. 

Whereas Google Trends normalizes the data to show relative topic popularity, BrightEdge tracks an enormous amount of real-time and historical search data, so you can see actual search volumes and other details that Google Trends does not provide. You can track real-time data using Daily Pulse. This insight can be used to both plan the content of your video, and optimize the title tag, description, keyword tags and other metadata for better search ranking. 

For tracked keywords within the platform, BrightEdge also provides reporting, so you can be alerted to spikes or dips in important keywords and topics and make necessary adjustments to a given video or content strategy. 

BrightEdge Instant, which is an available add-on to the BrightEdge platform, has a YouTube keyword research capability that enables you to track how well your YouTube videos and your competitors' videos are performing for any search in real time giving you, effectively, a YouTube rank tracker. It also supports YouTube-specific topic research so you can see which products, topics, and influencers are taking off, insight you can use to prioritize the marketing of relevant existing videos and to plan new video content.

However, you source YouTube search data, your use of the data should align with your content strategy: 

Are you looking to be the go-to source on an evergreen topic? In this case, it will be important to understand how search trends on the topic over time, which terms best capture the intent of consumers and which videos are capturing the most attention. From those sources, you can identify opportunities to improve on competitive content and optimize the video metadata for a higher search rank. You’ll also want to monitor activity, so you can optimize over time.

Is there a high-volume, but short-lived trend you want to capitalize on? You’ve just created a t-shirt of Tom Brady throwing the Lombardi trophy from his yacht and want to maximize sales while the iron is hot among his fans. Your research will want to focus on what relevant terms people in specific geographies are using to search right now. 

Are you losing market share to a competitor with an inferior product? You have an objectively better product, but your competitor is entrenched and receives a lot of traffic to its YouTube videos. As part of an overall initiative to steal market share, you’re going to need to understand their audience and how those viewers are finding your competitors’ videos. To do this, you’ll need to go beyond topical search trends and track your videos against your competitors’ videos, as well.

Research and Prosper

YouTube is a powerful marketing channel. Its highly specialized content makes it a go-to-source of information for billions of people worldwide, but remember, it is more than a channel for marketing your own video content. Take advantage of the customer insights and behavior trends you can glean from YouTube search data to plan and execute an effective content strategy and more.

Reading one of the best marketing books listed below is likely to change and improve the way you market. While there are many classic marketing books that could make a best-books list, the recommended reading list below focuses only on marketing books published within the last 5 years. Serious marketers should read the equivalent of 10 or more educational and industry books per year (2500 pages) to maintain and expand skills and knowledge. You may be surprised by the findings in BrightEdge Research's latest channel share report. One digital channel continues to grow and this data will help you make the case and prioritize your traffic efforts. Below are our suggestions for the must-read best marketing books this year.

Great marketing books for this year

1. Unleash Possible: A Marketing Playbook that Drives Sales by Samantha Stone

Like many marketing books, the subtitle well positions the books key thesis. Stone delivers the goods with a 15-chapter playbook that includes the frameworks, question lists, and templates that make you want to put the book down and try the tactics recommended. There are very few good books on product marketing that make the discipline more clear without burying you in too much theory or too many worksheets, but Stone does an excellent job detailing it. She has practical advice on how to move beyond profiles to personas and solid go-to-market planning. Download the SEO initiatives playbook. Another great section is on account based marketing, where she explains the unique role marketing plays in defining and running a significantly different program. She brings her extensive approach and skill as a consultant and experienced marketer to the challenges of a Marketing Playbook that Drives Sales. 

2. This Is Marketing: You Can't Be Seen Until You Learn to See By Seth Godin, 2018

The latest from one of the great thought leaders in Marketing. Marketers make change by creating tension which leads to new choices. That is the central premise of the book. Godin points out that marketers' job is to pick a story and repeat it and stick with long after we marketers become tired of it. He reminds us that over-reliance on ad spending is for lazy marketers. Download the content funnel mapping checklist. He disembowels marketers who cut price and race to the bottom as the laziest. "Low price is the last refuge of a marketer who has run out of generous ideas." Or maybe never had any to begin with.

3. Hacking Growth: How Today's Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success By Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown, 2017

Most marketing books are old wine in clever new bottles, but about once or twice a year I come across marketing books that are completely new wine. Hacking Growth is that wine, er, book and my top pick for 2019. Ellis named and started the growth hacker movement in 2010 after his successes at Dropbox and Logmein. The book is a how-to guide on running a growth program in your company. If you are in digital marketing and not evolving toward growth and away from channels and marketing activity, you are in danger of being left behind. Download the martech stack checklist. Epic, breakout book. Highly recommended.

4. Play Bigger: Create New Categories and Dominate Markets By Maney et al, 2016

Serious marketing executives need to be familiar with this book. In it the authors describe the process of category creation and how to become a category king. They cover how to discover a category, the power of a point of view, creating a flywheel, continuous category creation and how to overcome the innovator's dilemma, and finish with category definition and creation for your career. Download the site readiness checklist. Though marketing plays a big role, category creation has to be embraced by the whole company from the CEO down to have a chance.

5. Data-Driven Marketing with Artificial Intelligence: Harness the Power of Predictive Marketing and Machine Learning by Magnus Unemyr, 2018

The author says he was looking for marketing books that introduced and explained the martech companies and products that are using AI to help us do our jobs, and he could not find one, so he wrote this one. He identified the top two dozen products and interviewed each company to populate the first section of the book. He groups the products into the following sections: Competitive Intelligence, Predictive Pricing, Ads Strategy, E-commerce, Content Marketing, Lead and Customer Acquisition, Customer Relationships, Segmentation, and Customer Journey. That makes it a very helpful roadmap to evaluating and adopting AI solutions.

6. Building a Story Brand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen by Donald Miller, 2017

Storytelling is the focus of so many marketing books and assets in recent years that it is impossible to ignore; it's like a tidal wave washing over drab beaches cluttered with pale, self-promoting, feature-based marketing. Miller takes a topic that seems kind of obvious and adds his proven 7-step StoryBrand framework. He analyzes the structure of good story: character, problem, meets a guide, gets a plan, drives to action, avoids failure, and ends with a success. Where Miller exceeds Duarte is that he directly applies the storytelling structure to business cases that resonate with marketers like me and you. Download a free site style guide checklist to help you communicate your message to more customers.

7. Marketing: A Love Story, How to Matter to Your Customers by Bernadette Jiwa, 2014

Don't be deterred by the "love" in the title; instead focus on the ultra-compelling subtitle "How to Matter to Your Customers." Mattering to your customer requires emotional connection. These types of marketing books will apply for entrepreneurs, B2B, and B2C marketers. If you have been unsure about how to introduce emotion into your sales or marketing communication, this book will give you more insight, ideas, and inspiration than any other book out there. She claims you don't sell a product, you sell a story and doing so requires both facts and feelings. Download a Content Funnel Mapping Checklist to help you deliver your message to your prospects and customers.

8. The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use Social Media and Viral Marketing to Reach Buyers Directly by David Scott, 2017

The rules of digital marketing are constantly changing. Using case studies and real-life examples, Scott explores the latest best practices that lead to marketing success.

The book is a good introduction to the role of social media marketing and PR. The first part is an argument why organizations, especially smaller businesses and nonprofits, should emphasize social media and how the efficient use of social media depends on a different way of thinking compared to traditional media.

He covers the implications for web site content as well. See how to maximize the SEO value of press releases with this checklist.

9. Don't Make Me Think Revisited: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability By Steve Krug, 2014

Krug published the first edition in 2000, and the book has been the bible of user experience since the early 2000s. Web sites are the primary interface between most businesses and their customers. So all the great marketing campaigns in the world won't work well unless the site is effective at handling the customers marketing brings to it. The title is the recurring theme of the book: customers should not have to figure out or interpret your site, it should just work the way they expect. Download a free site style guide checklist to help you communicate your message to more customers. The book is shortish at 191 pages and uses the principles he recommends. It is colorful, uses high-contrast layout, and is very skimmable with clear headlines and subheads. Every marketer with a web site needs to read this book periodically.

10. PRE-SUASION: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade by Robert Cialdini, 2016

Cialdini wrote the seminal work on Influence in 1984; Pre-Suasion is the long-awaited sequel, and it delivers. Both books belong on a marketer's bookshelf because marketers work to influence people to take particular actions. In Pre-Suasion Cialdini goes deeper into the subtleties of persuasion, covering privileged moments, attention and importance, focus and causality, identity, place, crowds, and shared action. The book seemed particularly insightful and relevant after watching the momentous 2016 US presidential election. Watch a webinar on persuading your organization to support SEO. These insights help a marketer in two primary areas: 1) persuading internal colleagues and executives to support the marketing plan and its initiatives, 2) persuading the consumers to take appropriate action. A compelling read.

11. Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Digital Distraction by Derek Thomson, 2017

Thomson set out to study what makes things break big. This is an important topic for marketers whose main goal is to make their products known and loved by as many people in their target market as possible. He covers many media over the last 2 centuries, including Impressionist art, winning political speech and speakers, movies, music, fashion, books, Etsy hit products, and mobile apps. In the end he concludes there are no hard and fast rules on what makes things pop, but there are some reliable patterns: 1) simplicity, 2) familiarity, 3) frequency, 4) influential supporters, 5) close-knit supportive groups, 6) rhyming and catchy copy, 7) logical balance and intriguing inversion in messaging, 8) cross-channel support, 9) gradual innovation, and 10) ad hoc random influences. Thomson is a good, young writer and fine storyteller, and he has put together a useful treatise on a nebulous topic.

12. Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content by Ann Handley, 2014

Marketing is driven by content, so our next pick on the list of the best marketing books is about content creation. To create really good content, you need the writing skills to make your ideas come alive in an engaging way.

This book has dozens of useful insights for how to produce really good writing content. Highly recommended for all the marketers who write or edit content.

Read the free ebook on content marketing success.

13. The Ten Principles Behind Great Customer Experiences by Matt Watkinson, 2013

Watkinson is a designer and consultant who helps businesses get their customer experience right, and he brings a product and service design perspective to customer experience.

Great customer experiences are effortless -- for the customer. He outlines 3 areas to address: 1) Time on task, 2) Convenience, 3) Simplicity. Companies often lose track of this principle as they evolve and update their products and services. Download a checklist of site usability and readiness.

The book is an excellent read on design and customer delight which leads to better customer retention with many practical tips and takeaways.

14. Non-Obvious: How to Predict Trends and Win the Future By Rohit Bhargava, 2018

Bhargava focuses on the landscape in which we work, spots trends, and explains how marketers can tap into and take advantage of them. He also explains how to curate information and spot trends for those who are interested. Bhargava republishes the book each year as he understands that trends are fast moving and he wants to keep a current perspective. His trends include: Enlightened Consumption, Overtargeting, Brand Stand, Backstorytelling, Manipulated Outrage, Lightspeed Learning, Virtual Empathy, Human Mode, Data Pollution, and Predictive Protection among others. See how I tried to do some LightSpeed Learning by benchmarking your digital marketing skills with the 4-minute BrightEdge digital marketing quiz.

15. Barking Up the Wrong Tree: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Success Is (Mostly) Wrong By Eric Barker

This is one of the more general marketing books that marketers will find interesting. Barker reviews some well-trodden success paths and digs further and adds nuances that are fresh and interesting. He cites research that is less well known than what is usually cited in business success books. Here are some of the most interesting takeaways: Drinkers make 10% more money than non-drinkers and smokers make 7% less because drinking is social but smoking is usually private. Speaking early and often in groups causes other people to see you as a leader. Employee networks are valuable to companies; contacts are worth an average of $948 each. Wearing glasses does make people think you are smarter. Read the book to learn how all these data points fit together to make a person successful.

16. Digital Marketing for Dummies By Ryan Deiss and Russ Hennesberry, 2017

Digital Marketing for Dummies is published by Wiley. This book is an excellent reference, and it includes many practical, specific, and current details, insights, and advice. Learn more about the channels and the digital marketing technology in the free Martech Stack Checklist. It’s a very readable 300 pages and covers the customer journey, marketing planning, landing pages, blogging, SEO, SEM, social, display, email, and data and analytics. I like the focus on landing pages, which often get lost in the shuffle of channel and media planning as a high-leverage link in the funnel chain. They also reiterate the importance of the offer and revisiting and tuning the offer regularly. They provide 57 blog category ideas, including List, How-To, Research, Stat Roundup, People to Follow, Parody, Issue, Comparison, What-If, Challenge, and Products Tips to name just 11.

17. Blue Ocean Shift by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne, updated in 2017

Blue Ocean has become a fairly well-known term for creating new markets and not just fighting over the same fixed pie in your current market. A blue ocean strategy focuses on how to create new value for customers. Blue Ocean thinking requires managers to innovate how they plan, develop, and deploy value for their customers. Blue Ocean recommends against over-focusing on your competition for risk that doing so can make you more like them and less differentiated in consumers' minds. On the topic on creating new markets, I much prefer Play Bigger, listed above, over Blue Ocean Shift.

Read a list of recommended SEO books and top B2B marketing books in these posts. Also see our list of best digital marketing books.

Most of the titles on this best marketing books list are well worth the money and time and will help set you up for a productive year. After all that knowledge acquisition, learn more about enterprise SEO platforms.

The quality and quantity of the traffic coming to your site matters. Using SEM and SEO together will drive traffic using both organic and paid strategies.

What is SEO?

SEO (or search engine optimization) is the practice of structuring your website’s pages to make it easier for search engines to crawl your site, making your pages more easily discoverable to users and search spiders, and providing unique information or helpful resources through content planning on topics that searchers are looking for. SEO is the process of improving your website to enhance the user experience and to increase quality traffic to your site. 

SEO includes both on and off-page elements. Some on-page SEO tactics include optimizing image alt text and title tags. Some off-page SEO strategies include backlinking and guest blogging. Combining all on-page and off-page SEO strategies will increase your opportunity for ranked pages.

Creating data-driven content that is fresh, unique and informative for users, not bots, will help drive ranks. Well-developed content that provides real value to readers is one of the most crucial parts of SEO. While keyword research and implementation are still a ranking factor, search engines are ranking content more predominantly based on the information provided to a user and the user experience. Search engines are better able to understand search intent therefore your content should be absolutely written for users in order to rank well

What is SEM?

What does SEM stand for? SEM stands for search engine marketing and is a paid marketing tactic to promote a site, drive traffic to your website through pay-per-click advertising (PPC) and increase page exposure in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Using PPC drives immediate visibility to your website through ads.

SEO vs SEM: The Battleground

Simply put, SEM is a paid strategy with an immediate impact while SEO is an organic strategy that shows results over time. 

Creating a paid ad that grabs the attention of a targeted audience using a great message and call to action (CTA), is only a conversion driver for the time being and for as long as you are willing to spend. 93% of digital marketers are investing in paid ads. 

Leveraging SEM generates traffic, clicks, leads, opportunities, etc. to your website immediately but is not necessarily a sustainable strategy for traffic. Once the spend on your advertisement is up, so is your SEM strategy. 

SEO, however, takes a different approach. It is believed that SEO has a much larger impact on users than SEM does. Why? Because the first organic result receives a 28.5% CTR while a paid ad only receives a 10% CTR. Organic search drives 53% of web traffic whereas paid drives 27%. While you can see traffic growth with both SEO and SEM separately, you’ll win biggest by doing both together.

SEO typically takes longer to gain traction but has better results and much more staying power. Creating content that is well-optimized without spending ad dollars is a long-term plan for ranking high in the SERPs.

Because search engines analyze your site content for expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness (E-A-T), it takes time for your pages to increase in ranks. Search engines crawl pages to find unique and high-quality content that is up to date, optimized and well-written for users. 

If your page is ranking on the first page of a search engine, this indicates search engines trust your information and your site. They are offering users your information as opposed to someone else’s. Because of this, you will see more quality traffic and leads coming to your site. 

Though your SEM campaign is targeted, sometimes you may see less quality traffic coming from your ad. This can be due to click fraud. Competitors may see your ad and click into it to inflate the number of clicks on your ad costing your company more ad spend. This is a black hat strategy to use up ad spend early on to remove your ad for the rest of the day.

Using SEO and SEM together

Can you successfully leverage SEO and SEM together? Yes! 

Is it more impactful to use SEO and SEM together? If you are doing it well and your ads complement your SEO strategy, also yes!

To successfully leverage SEO and SEM together, you need to first begin with keyword research. Performing keyword research for the pages you want to rank for is one of the most important aspects of SEO. Products like Data Cube and Instant help you perform keyword research and leverage that knowledge to create new and better-performing content.

So, what can SEO and SEM working together achieve? The most ideal result for using SEO and SEM together is that your site lands the top organic SERPs and your company is driving even more visibility with an ad, as well. Here, users have the decision to click on your ad if it is relevant to them or your organic result.

Combining insights and data for more visibility into your audience from both SEO and SEM will produce greater results. Knowing how to use SEO and SEM together is an essential strategy to the growth of your site’s traffic. SEO drives top-of-funnel leads while SEM drives bottom-funnel leads.

The Case for Developing an SEM Strategy

SEO is becoming more important and as more brands realize that more strategy is building around optimizing pages and driving ranks for the top and most competitive keywords out there. But sometimes your SEO team may find it difficult to rank for certain keywords. 

The competition for keywords that are important to you may be extremely high. If this is the case, leveraging SEM strategies can drive traffic to your site for keywords you are not able to rank for within the first few pages on the SERPs. BrightEdge Instant can help you understand and evaluate keyword competitiveness, and search intent. 

If a keyword is highly competitive, it may not be worth your team’s time to optimize pages for it. Using Instant, you can perform keyword research for keywords that are related to one another but may not have the same level of competitiveness.

Below are some additional reasons to develop an SEM strategy:

• If you’re looking to capture more user data than organic traffic offers using PPC ads, you can link to dashboards like Google Analytics to see clicks, impressions, sessions, CTR, average cost-per-click, conversions and more.
• If you’re looking to drive conversions. SEM is conversion-driven, and ads are created around a specific CTA. Leverage SEM to convert users.
• If you’re looking to boost short-term campaigns or promotions that will start and end in less time than SEO will generate traffic. SEM can expedite the sales and promotions cycle. Use SEM strategy to get your message to users ASAP about an event, a sale, a new product or service, etc. You can use SEM to drive users and traffic to your site within hours of a live ad.
• If you’re looking to drive traffic sooner while waiting for SEO to drive results. If you’re creating content based on an important keyword or topic you want to rank for, writing the post and publishing it won’t get you traffic immediately but making it the CTA of your ad will. 

Additionally, having more detailed data from ads may help you understand your audience better. You can also leverage SEM for retargeting purposes. Retargeting is when you target users that have previously clicked on your ads. If a user has taken interest in your ads before, you can drive even more brand awareness to them through retargeting.

SEM is a short-term solution to drive traffic to your site and encourage conversions instantaneously. It is most ideal to leverage SEO and SEM together to increase quality traffic to your site. But while you are working on SEO, a well-optimized SEM strategy in place will create visibility in the meantime. Once you get the hang of SEO and SEM, your combined strategies should operate well together.