Episode 11: What Makes SEM Difficult to DIY Well?

There are so many folks selling “search engine” services these days. And a lot of that is “snake oil” –– especially when you talk about “search engine optimization” or SEO. And this no doubt bleeds over into the SEM – or “search engine marketing” field too. Today Ryan unpacks just exactly why SEM is so hard to do yourself.

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https://www.logicalposition.com/

TRANSCRIPT:

Jon:
There are so many folks selling search engine services these days, and that is a lot of snake oil out there. Especially when you start talking about search engine optimization or SEO, this no doubt bleeds over to SEM, or search engine marketing field, as well. The challenge that I see here with SEM is similar to what often happens in my world with conversion rate optimization. There are a ton of free resources out there, checklists, how-to articles, online trainings and certifications, and most of them are too high level and broad to actually be helpful with the e-commerce site. In my view, this really makes SEM very hard to do yourself, especially if you're an e-comm owner.
Ryan, today I'm really interested in your thoughts about search engine marketing and why and what makes it so difficult to do it yourself? I really can't wait to get schooled by you once again. Ryan, let's start maybe with what your definition of search engine marketing is.

Ryan:
It's not complicated, for me. Search engine marketing involves making sure that you are showing up when people are searching for your product or service. As long as there's an intent or a search around that and an active process of putting something in, whether that's voice or typing, texting, it's ... they are searching for it. For me, the biggest ones are obviously Google. Bing, which is now Microsoft Ads. And then I consider Amazon Ads search engine marketing. Yahoo's in there but they usually just get powered by Google and Microsoft Ads themselves. In all of those platforms they are searching for it, and you can design a specific ad in that system to attract that searcher.

Jon:
That's interesting. I just heard something that brought up an interesting point for me. I've always thought about search engine marketing just being on search engines, but there's so many things out there that are search engines right now. YouTube is the number two search engine. Would you consider showing up in results and marketing around YouTube part of this?

Ryan:
I guess ancillary, to a degree, yes. It's part of Google. Google owns YouTube and you advertise on YouTube through the Google Ads platform. When you're capturing searches on Google looking for your particular product, you can also have YouTube ads, as far as remarketing.
The difference I see on YouTube versus general search engine platforms is that a not a lot of people go to YouTube to find the product to buy. They may be doing some higher level research on looking for reviews. If I'm looking to buy a Bluetooth speaker, my dad just bought one for his neighbor, he had to do some research and figure out which one was going to be easiest because she's 80 years old. You can go on YouTube and find some reviews about ease of use or older people using Bluetooth speakers, and see which one's easiest. It's a research process, more, on YouTube, then it'll be, "I need a Bluetooth speaker now. I'm going to go to YouTube and buy one."
Generally that's not how people are trying to transact yet. They can transact with Google or go to the website and buy it, or they go to Amazon and buy from the Amazon platform.

Jon:
That definitely makes sense. It's ancillary there but it's not the main way you would define it. You're thinking Google, Bing, those type of search engines at this point?

Ryan:
Yeah. They're actually searching for the product or service. That, for me, is the big key. In the paid realm, it involves a lot of things outside of a search engine. You can pay for display ads that are prospecting, they're not searching for you yet, or you're remarketing through those ads that can happen across the internet. You have social ads where you're marketing to followers of your brand or trying to find new followers and get your products in front of them for them to try, but they're not actively searching for that product. You're trying to get them to search for that product. So search, generally, I see further down the funnel.

Jon:
Okay.

Ryan:
[Crosstalk 00:04:18] a cut when people are not searching for it.

Jon:
That definitely makes sense to me then.
I know this is a high level question but it is the topic of the episode today. Let's just dive in. What makes SEM so difficult to do it yourself?

Ryan:
Jon, that is a great question because it crosses the mind of almost every business owner as they're looking through a [PNL 00:04:38] and see the charge for an agency or an individual that's managing their marketing, like, "Well, why can't I just save this money, put that in my pocket, or develop something else with that extra money monthly or annually?"
The real answer is because the search engines are constantly changing. What is currently happening on Google or what you currently see on your phone or your desktop when you do a search, is not the way it's going to look in a couple months, six months down the road. That constant change means that you need somebody or something to keep on top of all of those changes constantly. Just from the Google algorithm of ranking organic results, I think there's 500 to 600 changes every single year to that algorithm alone. If you've been in e-comm long enough, you've seen a huge change around the paid side of things. You had Frugal 12 years ago, 10 years ago, where all of your clicks and shopping were free. Then it changed into PLAs, then the Google officially called it Google Shopping and then there was Smart Shopping.
In between those big shifts, there was all these little changes. Constantly new ad sets, new placements. We now have ads that show in Google images. We have Google Shopping showing all over the place and being able to dissect and see which ad types are working versus not working. It's crazy how much development we have to do internally to keep on it, and we have 700 people at the company constantly researching, studying. And then we have that group think kind of thing going on. But that amount of change is astronomical, and I've been in the industry for 10 years.
My general thought is, I've been studying to be an expert for over a decade now, and I'm still, by no means, the smartest person in e-comm marketing. There's people like [Frederic Filloux 00:06:19] whose brains are ... I'll probably never catch him, but if you're a business owner or a marketer and you've not been studying specifically how to be the best possible expert in paid search, for example, you're going to beat ... get beat by somebody that's been studying it to survive or as a career path, or because they're super passionate just about paid search.
I think understanding that dynamic, it makes it difficult to say, "Oh, yeah, I probably should DIY this to either save some money or because I think I can really do it well." I think about it as, you're going to be in a fight with somebody, because that's kind of what paid search is. It's your money versus theirs, your ad versus theirs, for the consumer at the end of it all. You could be a decent fighter, but if you're not a professional, you're not going to jump into the octagon and try to take on somebody that does this for a living and eat, sleeps, trains, and breathes ultimate fighting. It's not going to happen.

Jon:
We don't need to get kicked in the face because you have not been training, right?

Ryan:
Exactly.

Jon:
Let's break that down then. There'...