Develop your visibility quickly on search engines thanks to the use of SEA

An SEA agency is an agency that carries out search engine advertising or paid search. These agencies specialise in creating and optimising Google Ads and Bing Ads campaigns on behalf of their clients. The objective of these agencies is to help you grow your visibility and your business on search engines.

In order to find the best SEA agency for your project, it is important to ask yourself the right questions and evaluate some important criteria : 

• Is the agency specialised in SEA or is it a global communication agency?

It is important to work with specialists to avoid many pitfalls.

• Are the consultants certified?

SEA consultants can take certifications to prove their levels. It is important when choosing an SEA agency to ensure that the agency's consultants have these certifications. 

• Is the agency a Google partner? 

In order to be a Google partner, agencies must validate a certain number of elements: account optimisation rate, minimum investments, certifications. This is a good way for you to ensure that the agency is also specialised in paid search.

• Who will be your consultant and what is their level of experience?

Usually a consultant is assigned to your account, this person will be your main contact and the one who will optimise your account. It is therefore important to know a little more about this person before starting your mission.

Each medium has its own advantages and a good customer acquisition strategy must take this into account. You need to create the right mix of channels that interact with each other in harmony.

SEA is a channel with short term results, as soon as you start investing, you can appear at the top of Google and generate your first customers 

It is also a channel that allows you to invest on a targeted audience from your most strategic keywords. 

Among its advantages, you can also understand, by setting up an accurate tracking, which are your keywords that generate conversions to measure your profitability.

The main drawbacks of paid referencing are: 

• The cost

You have to pay to appear in the first results. Each click on one of your ads charges you a certain amount, which can range from a few cents to several dozen euros for the most expensive keywords.

• If you stop investing, you disappear

When you stop running your campaigns and therefore investing, you will no longer appear in the search results, unlike in SEO.

SEA or paid search is as its name suggests not free. You have to dedicate a budget to appear in the search results.

Generally, we recommend a test budget of 2000 euros to be able to know if this channel can be relevant and work for you. This budget will allow you to collect data and know what works for your business. 

This budget will obviously depend on your market. Some markets with high CPCs require larger test budgets.

To find out more, ask an expert for advice on how to allocate your budget.

It is important at the beginning, when launching a campaign, to put in at least 20 euros per day to collect enough data to make decisions. Once the first results are obtained, you can modify the amount upwards or downwards according to the first returns.

Each agency has a different billing system. Some agencies will charge a percentage of the spend, while others will charge based on the time spent on the account. In general, rates vary between 10% and 20% of the budget spent and many agencies will only work under 2000 to 3000 euros of advertising spend to make it viable for the client. 

Google Ads and Bing ads (microsoft ads) are different advertising platforms. The first one is the platform to display your ads in Google results while the second one allows you to display on Bing and its partners (yahoo, aol, qwant...). Currently, Google dominates in terms of market share of global searches. It is therefore important to first test on Google before moving on to Microsoft advertising.

The acronym SEA stands for Search Engine Advertising, while SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing. To clear up all the ambiguities and errors we frequently hear, we need to understand this little formula: SEA + SEO = SEM. SEM is therefore the combination of free and paid referencing.