Search engine marketing built for what’s next

Search engine marketing, or SEM, is the use of paid advertising to increase a brand’s visibility when people search online. Traditionally, SEM has centered on paid search ads across platforms such as Google and Microsoft Bing, allowing advertisers to reach people based on the words and phrases they search.

Search engine marketing starts by understanding what your customers are searching for and the intent behind those searches. We then build campaigns around relevant queries, align targeting and ad creative to that intent, and guide people to the most relevant product or service page. From there, landing pages are optimised towards the desired action, whether that’s a lead, enquiry, sale or another valuable conversion. Keywords remain an important input, but modern search marketing considers much more than the keyword alone. Platforms can use factors such as the meaning and context of a search, location, previous searches and other available signals alongside predicted conversion performance to decide when an advertiser should enter an auction and how much to bid.

SEM and SEO both aim to increase visibility in search, but they achieve it differently. Search engine marketing uses paid advertising to reach relevant searchers, while search engine optimisation builds organic visibility by improving the relevance, authority and technical performance of a website. SEM can create visibility and capture demand quickly, while SEO builds organic presence over time. Used together, they can give brands a stronger overall presence across search results, cover different stages of the customer journey and generate insights that can improve both paid and organic search strategies.

The terms are often used interchangeably, but they describe slightly different things. Search engine marketing describes the discipline of using paid advertising within search environments, while pay-per-click, or PPC, describes an advertising model where an advertiser pays when somebody clicks an ad. Paid search is one of the most common forms of PPC, but PPC can also apply to advertising outside traditional search engines. At Connected, our search engine marketing approach focuses specifically on using paid search to understand and capture customer intent.

Google Ads is the largest platform used for search engine marketing in Australia, but SEM is not limited to Google. Microsoft Advertising and Bing can provide incremental search reach, while platforms such as Amazon Ads and ChatGPT are increasingly becoming important environments for product discovery, research and search. The wider search landscape is changing as people discover products, services and information across more platforms than ever. For most Australian businesses, Google Search remains the starting point for capturing lower-funnel search intent, while other platforms can provide additional opportunities to reach audiences earlier or in different moments of the decision journey.

Yes, but keywords are increasingly one signal within a much broader system. Traditional SEM relied heavily on manually selecting keywords, choosing match types and adjusting bids. Those controls still have a role, but search platforms can now use machine learning to understand the meaning behind searches and combine that information with other signals to identify opportunities. This means modern search marketing is moving from simply asking “Which keyword should we bid on?” towards “Which searches, people and moments are most likely to deliver the outcome we want?”

AI is changing both how people search and how search campaigns are delivered. Within advertising platforms, machine learning can analyse signals in real time, automate bids, expand matching beyond explicitly selected keywords and adapt advertising messages to different searches. That shifts the role of the search marketer. Technical expertise remains important, but performance increasingly depends on strategy, quality conversion data, audience understanding, creative inputs and knowing when to give algorithms flexibility, and when to apply human control.

Search advertising was once dominated by relatively fixed text ads, keywords and manual optimisation. Today, advertisers can provide multiple headlines, descriptions and other assets that platforms combine and optimise according to the search and context. As more technical decisions become automated, the quality and range of the inputs become more important. Strong search creative needs to understand why someone is searching, communicate a compelling reason to choose the brand and connect naturally with the experience after the click.

Yes. Search remains particularly powerful when people demonstrate clear commercial intent, but modern targeting and machine learning can help advertisers interpret a broader range of searches and signals. That creates opportunities beyond the obvious high-intent keyword. Search engine marketing can support consideration, capture emerging demand and identify potentially valuable customers earlier in their decision journey, while still retaining its traditional strength closer to conversion.

SEO and SEM solve different parts of the same search challenge. SEM gives brands immediate, controllable paid visibility, while SEO builds sustainable organic visibility and authority. Used together, they can increase overall search presence, cover different stages of the customer journey and give brands more opportunities to be visible when customers are looking.