Search Engine Marketing Services That Drive Real Results
TESSA Marketing & Technology has delivered SEM services to companies worldwide since 2012. We’ve built our search engine marketing practice around a simple discipline: every dollar of investment should be traceable to a business outcome – leads, sales, qualified pipeline, or measurable brand lift. Anything less is just activity, and activity isn’t a strategy.
TESSA Marketing & Technology is a PPC and search engine marketing agency based in McLean, Virginia, serving Northern Virginia businesses and companies worldwide since 2012. We manage Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising campaigns and tie every dollar of spend to a business outcome: leads, sales or qualified pipeline. PPC management starts at $1,500 a month plus ad spend.
This page covers TESSA’s SEM services in detail: what search engine marketing actually means in 2026, how our SEM management delivers measurable growth, the campaign structure we use for every client account, our SEM agency pricing and what’s included, and why companies hire TESSA over the typical search engine marketing agency or generic PPC management provider.
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What Search Engine Marketing Actually Means in 2026
Search engine marketing (SEM) is the practice of getting your business in front of buyers at the moment they’re searching for what you sell. Done well, search engine marketing combines search advertising on platforms like Google and Bing with the broader search marketing services that drive qualified traffic and revenue from search engines. SEM is not a single tactic: it’s a coordinated strategy across multiple ad formats on the search engines, plus the analytics infrastructure that makes them measurable.
The Components of Modern Search Engine Marketing
The textbook definition of search engine marketing has always included both paid placements and the technical work that supports them. In practice, modern search engine marketing services span Google ad campaigns, Bing campaigns, placements on local maps, YouTube video ads, display and banner ads across the Google Display Network, retargeting through Google’s audience networks, and the conversion tracking, landing pages, and analytics that turn campaign performance data into smarter decisions over time.
How Search Engine Marketing Differs From SEO
Search engine marketing is distinct from search engine optimization (SEO). Where search engine optimization earns unpaid rankings through technical site work, content, and link earning, search engine marketing buys placement directly through search engine advertising. Both have a role in a complete marketing strategy. Most TESSA clients run both — we operate as both a search engine marketing agency and an SEO agency under one roof, so the two efforts reinforce each other instead of competing for budget.
Buyers researching a major purchase spend weeks comparing options before they ever contact a company. Search engine marketing reaches those buyers at the moment of intent.
How buyers actually shop
How Major Search Engines Work for Search Engine Marketing
Effective search engine marketing requires understanding how the top search engines actually rank and serve ads. Search engines aren’t black boxes – they’re auction systems with documented rules, learned patterns, and clear levers an advertiser can pull. Companies that understand how search engines judge an ad consistently outperform companies that just throw money at search engines and hope.
The Search Engines That Drive Paid Search
The two top platforms that matter for paid search are Google and Bing (operated by Microsoft Advertising). Google handles the large majority of search queries globally, but the smaller platform has been gaining ground, particularly since the Copilot integration. A complete approach considers both and allocates budget based on where each search engine delivers the best return on advertising spend.
How the Ad Auction Works
Inside the SEM ad auction, every placement decision involves four factors: the advertiser’s bid, the quality score of the ad and landing page, the expected click through rates of the ad based on historical data, and the relevance of the ad to the search query. The top search engines combine these signals into an Ad Rank score that determines which ads appear in which positions on the results pages. Higher quality scores can win positions that lower-quality competitors can’t reach on search engines at any bid.
Beyond the primary search engines, secondary platforms also matter for specific industries. YouTube is one of the world’s largest search engines for video content. Amazon is the leading product search engine for ecommerce. App stores are search engines for mobile applications. A full SEM approach considers all of these search engines, not just the traditional desktop results page.
Search engines also evolve continuously. The integration of AI into search platforms — Google’s AI Overviews, Bing’s Copilot, Perplexity, ChatGPT search — is changing how search engines surface ads and organic listings. Any search engine marketing firm that doesn’t adapt to AI-influenced search engines falls behind quickly.
Google: The Primary Search Engine
Google dominates most search markets globally, accounting for the large majority of search queries worldwide. Google Ads campaigns reach buyers across Search, Maps, YouTube, Gmail, and millions of partner sites. For most TESSA clients, it is the primary focus and accounts for 70-85% of total search engine marketing budget allocation.
Bing: The Underrated Search Engine
Bing has grown into a meaningful search engine competitor since Microsoft’s OpenAI partnership and the Copilot integration. While it is smaller than Google, its audience often delivers higher conversion rates and cheaper clicks, which makes it one of the underrated search engines in modern SEM strategy.
Vertical Search Engines
Specialized search engines like Amazon (product search), YouTube (video search), and LinkedIn (professional search) represent additional search engines that matter for specific verticals. Comprehensive SEM extends beyond Google and Bing to include these vertical search engines where appropriate.
AI-Powered Search Engines
AI-powered search engines like ChatGPT search, Perplexity, and Claude are growing fast. These new search engines source content differently than traditional search engines — relying more on direct citation and authoritative source identification. Optimizing for AI answers requires different work than traditional SEO.
Local Search Engines
Google Maps functions as a local search engine, and so do Yelp, TripAdvisor, and industry-specific local search engines. Local businesses need search engine marketing campaigns that cover all of the local search engines their customers actually use, not just the general-purpose search engines.
Mobile App Search Engines
App store search engines on iOS and Android are search engines too — they just look different. App store optimization is a specialized form of search engine marketing for businesses with mobile apps. Even traditional search engines now include app results in search engine results pages.
SEO works with search engine marketing rather than against it. The same search engines that serve ads also serve the unpaid results, and businesses that invest in both get far more total visibility on the search engines than those who invest in just one. SEO is a long-term play on the search engines, while SEM delivers immediate placements in the search engines. Our SEO agency work covers technical SEO, content strategy for search engines, link earning for search engines, and the analytical work that turns search engine data into action.
Most TESSA clients eventually run both SEM and SEO with us. As an SEO agency, we optimize the unpaid listings across the search engines; as an SEM agency, we run paid campaigns on the same search engines. Coordinating the two on search engines is the foundation of our integrated approach. The two efforts share data, keyword targeting, landing page work, and reporting. One agency handling both under one roof produces better total results on the search engines than two separate vendors who don’t talk to each other.
Search engines reward businesses that invest in both SEO and paid presence. Signals like dwell time, return visits, and branded search frequency are all influenced by the combined effect of SEO, paid search engine marketing, social media marketing, and the rest of the marketing mix. Search engines are increasingly holistic in how they evaluate websites, which is why fragmented marketing efforts produce fragmented results on the search engines.
Why Companies Hire TESSA’s Search Engine Marketing Firm
What Sets TESSA Apart
The search engine marketing services market is crowded. Hundreds of agencies offer SEM. Most look interchangeable on the surface — same Google Partner badges, same case study formats, same promises. Here’s what genuinely separates TESSA from the typical digital marketing agency or search marketing company.
14+ Years of Search Engine Marketing Experience
TESSA has been delivering search engine marketing services since 2012. We’ve run search campaigns through every major search platform update — Enhanced Campaigns, the move to Smart Bidding, the launch of Performance Max, Demand Gen replacing Discovery Ads, and the integration of AI into nearly every part of the search engine ecosystem. That experience shows in every account we run.
Integrated SEO and SEM
Most search engine marketing agency providers are paid-search-only. TESSA is both an SEM agency and an SEO agency. We’ve watched the paid-organic interplay for over a decade and know how to allocate budget between SEM and SEO to maximize total search visibility, not just one channel’s metrics.
Performance Max and AI-driven Bidding Expertise
Google’s Performance Max campaigns and Smart Bidding strategies dominate modern campaign management. Our team has run hundreds of Performance Max campaigns across industries and knows which inputs actually drive results — versus inputs that simply look like they matter to search engines.
Bing and Microsoft Advertising Beyond Google
Bing has grown significantly since Microsoft’s OpenAI partnership and the Copilot integration. We run ads there for clients where it makes sense: typically B2B companies, older demographics, and verticals where the audience overlap with the target audience justifies the additional management overhead.
Honest Reporting, Real Results
Most search engine marketing agency reports drown clients in vanity metrics. TESSA reports the metrics that actually matter: cost per acquisition, return on investment, conversion rate, qualified pipeline generated, revenue attributable to search marketing. We tie campaign performance to business outcomes.
Senior Strategic Attention from a Top Search Engine Marketing Agency
Most search engine marketing consultants hand client work to junior account managers after the sale. At TESSA, you get direct access to senior leadership on every account: Kevin Callen (Co-Founder) and Matt Callen (Co-Founder), not just account executives reading from a playbook. Senior attention is built in.
TESSA’s Search Engine Marketing Services in Detail
Our search engine marketing SEM services span the full paid-search ecosystem. The list below covers the specific search marketing services we deliver. Most clients engage us for a coordinated mix of these services as part of a broader SEM strategy rather than picking individual line items.
Google Ads Management
Account management is the foundation of most TESSA SEM engagements. We manage accounts for clients ranging from small businesses spending $2,000 per month on ads to enterprises running seven-figure annual budgets. Every account we touch gets a full audit, a strategic restructure if needed, and ongoing management built around return on advertising rather than impression volume.
Search engine marketing management at TESSA includes Search campaigns, Performance Max campaigns, Demand Gen, YouTube video ads, and Display campaigns. We pick the campaigns that fit the client’s goals, not the ones that pad agency reports.
Microsoft Advertising Management
Bing has grown into a serious paid-search channel since Copilot arrived in its search results. We run search ads there for B2B clients, professional services firms, government contractors, and consumer brands where the audience overlap justifies the additional management. It frequently delivers cheaper clicks for the same buyer intent, but only if the campaign is managed by people who understand its quirks.
Paid Search Strategy and Account Architecture
Most underperforming campaign accounts have an account architecture problem, not a bid problem. We restructure accounts on both platforms to align campaign organization, ad groups, keyword themes, and conversion goals: the foundation that determines whether the rest of the SEM strategy can succeed. This is one of the highest-leverage activities in any SEM program.
Keyword Research and Search Intent Analysis
Keyword research isn’t just identifying high-volume terms. It’s understanding the buyer journey behind each search query (informational, navigational, commercial, transactional) and matching campaign structure to that intent. Our keyword research process surfaces high-value keywords your competitors are missing and eliminates wasted budget on keywords with poor intent match.
Compelling Ad Copy and Creative Testing
Compelling ad copy is what makes the difference between ads that get clicks and ads that get scrolled past. Our SEM services include ad copy development across every match type and ad format. We A/B test ad copy, headline combinations, and description variations to find what resonates with each target audience segment.
Landing Pages That Convert
The ad gets the click. The landing page determines whether the click becomes a customer. Our search engine marketing campaign work includes landing page strategy, design, copy, and conversion rate optimization. Most search marketing companies and digital marketing agencies stop at the ad. TESSA carries responsibility through to the landing page experience, because that’s where the actual business outcome happens.
Conversion Tracking and Analytics
Every TESSA SEM engagement starts with proper conversion tracking setup — Google Analytics 4 events, server-side tracking where appropriate, enhanced conversions, and attribution modeling. If the analytics are broken, every other decision is wrong by default. We don’t trust accounts whose analytics we didn’t validate ourselves.
Bid Strategy and Smart Bidding Optimization
Google’s Smart Bidding strategies (Target CPA, Target ROAS, Maximize Conversions) have become the default for most modern advertiser accounts. Our SEM agency team understands when each Smart Bidding strategy makes sense, when manual bids still beat automation, and how to feed the algorithm the conversion data quality it needs to perform.
Display and Banner Ad Campaigns
Display and banner ads on the Google Display Network reach audiences across millions of web pages and video placements. We design display campaigns that complement search marketing rather than duplicating it — retargeting site visitors, building brand awareness with cold audiences, and supporting product launches with coordinated creative.
YouTube and Video Advertising
YouTube video ads have become an essential part of modern search engine marketing. They reach buyers researching purchases, comparing options, and consuming education content: exactly the audiences that traditional SEM ads also target. We run video campaigns for clients ranging from B2B SaaS to consumer e-commerce.
Retargeting and Audience Building
Retargeting campaigns close the gap between the first site visit and the eventual purchase. Most buyers don’t convert on the first visit, and a thoughtful retargeting program brings them back to convert later. Our retargeting work spans Google, Bing, and integrated audience-based campaigns across the broader digital marketing ecosystem.
Local Search and Local Maps
For local businesses, Google Maps placements and local SEM ads are often the highest-ROI placements available. Our local SEO and local SEM work integrate to dominate both organic local pack rankings and paid local map placements. See our local SEO services for the related SEO work.
Our Search Engine Marketing Process: From Audit to Scale
Every TESSA search engine marketing campaign follows a clear process designed to deliver predictable results. We don’t believe in “growth hacks” or “secret tactics” — what works in search engine marketing is rigorous execution of fundamentals, applied continuously over time. Our process is documented, repeatable, and accountable.
Discovery and Goals Alignment
Every engagement starts with discovery. We meet with key stakeholders to understand the business, the buying cycle, the target audience, the competitive landscape, and the specific business outcomes the SEM campaign needs to drive. We document target CPA, target ROAS, monthly budgets, geographic targeting, and the conversion definitions that will determine campaign success.
This discovery phase is not a sales call. It’s a strategic working session that produces a clear brief for the SEM strategy ahead.
Account and Analytics Audit
If a Google Ads account already exists, we conduct a comprehensive audit before changing anything. The audit covers account architecture, campaign organization, ad group hygiene, keyword match types, conversion tracking, attribution settings, audience definitions, ad copy quality, landing page experience, and historical performance trends. The audit output is a list of specific issues with prioritized fixes.
We audit Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and any third-party analytics infrastructure with the same rigor. Bad data leads to bad decisions. The audit determines whether existing data is trustworthy or whether new tracking infrastructure needs to be built before campaign work can proceed.
Keyword Research and Competitive Analysis
With clean analytics in place, we run comprehensive keyword research. We identify high-value keywords aligned with buyer intent, eliminate ineffective keywords that waste budget, build out negative keyword lists, and analyze competitor search campaign positioning. The output is a complete keyword strategy mapped to the campaign architecture.
Keyword research at TESSA isn’t a one-time activity. We refresh keyword data quarterly to catch new search trends, retire keywords that stop performing, and identify new opportunities as the market shifts.
Campaign Structure and Architecture Build
We build or restructure the search engine account with proper campaign architecture. Campaigns are organized by funnel stage, geographic targeting, product line, or buyer persona — whichever segmentation makes sense for the specific business. Ad groups are tightly themed. Match types are deliberately chosen. The architecture supports both manual optimization and Smart Bidding automation.
Ad Creative and Landing Page Development
We develop compelling ad copy across multiple variations per ad group. Headlines, descriptions, callouts, sitelinks, structured snippets — everything that contributes to ad strength gets created intentionally rather than dropped in to populate required fields. We also build or optimize landing pages for high conversion, because the best ad on a bad landing page still fails.
Launch and Initial Optimization
Campaigns launch with conservative bid strategies, careful audience targeting, and strict budget caps to control risk. The first two weeks are intensive monitoring — search query reports daily, bid adjustments as data accumulates, ad rotation checks, and negative keyword additions to filter wasted impressions. Most campaign performance issues surface in the first 14 days.
Ongoing Optimization and Testing
Once campaigns are stable, we shift to ongoing optimization mode. Weekly bid strategy review. Bi-weekly ad copy A/B testing. Monthly landing page testing. Quarterly account restructure and strategy review. Continuous keyword expansion and negative keyword additions. The auction never stops, so neither does the work that keeps campaigns effective. Understanding how search engines work today is foundational.
Strategic Reporting and Business Reviews
Monthly reports show what changed, what worked, what didn’t, and what we’re doing about it. Quarterly business reviews go deeper — connecting search campaign performance to business outcomes, identifying opportunities for budget reallocation, surfacing strategic questions that need executive input. Reporting is honest and direct, not a slideshow of cherry-picked wins.
Search Engine Marketing Strategy: What Actually Drives Results
Most clients hire a search marketing company expecting tactics. The tactics matter, but tactics are only effective inside a coherent SEM strategy. The strategic decisions made before any campaign launches on the various search engines determine most of the eventual outcome — campaign architecture, target audience definition, conversion goal hierarchy, attribution model selection, budget allocation across channels.
Our search engine marketing strategy framework starts from business outcomes and works backward. What does success look like in 12 months? What does the customer journey actually involve? Which search queries indicate readiness to buy versus early research? What is the lifetime value of a customer, and how much can you afford to pay for each new one? Without clear answers to these questions, no amount of campaign optimization will deliver consistent results.
Full-Funnel Search Strategy
Search engine marketing isn’t just bottom-funnel conversion campaigns. A complete SEM approach includes awareness-stage display and video placements, consideration-stage informational ad campaigns, and decision-stage transactional search advertising. A skilled SEM agency builds tailored strategies for each part of the funnel that compound over time.
Search Intent-Driven Campaign Architecture
Every search query carries intent. The smartest SEM agencies organize campaigns by intent type — informational, navigational, commercial investigation, transactional — rather than by topic or product. Intent-driven campaign architecture lets bid strategy match the value of each click type.
Privacy-First Tracking Infrastructure
Third-party cookie deprecation, Apple’s privacy changes, and tightening consent rules have made conversion tracking dramatically harder than it was five years ago. Our SEM ads strategy includes enhanced conversions, server-side tagging, Google Consent Mode v2, and first-party data activation — the infrastructure modern search engine marketing requires to remain measurable.
Bid Strategy Aligned to Business Economics
Target CPA, Target ROAS, Maximize Conversions, Maximize Conversion Value: each automated strategy fits different business situations. We align bid strategy with unit economics, sales cycle length, customer lifetime value, and marketing budgets to maximize the metric that actually matters to the business.
Geographic and Audience Targeting
Geo-targeting and audience layering can transform campaign performance. We layer in-market audiences, custom audiences built from website behavior, customer match lists, and detailed geographic targeting to reach the right buyer at the right moment with the right message.
Competitive Conquesting and Defense
Smart SEM strategy includes competitive conquesting (selectively targeting competitor brand terms) and brand defense to prevent competitors from stealing your own branded search traffic. Both require nuance to execute without wasting budget or attracting trademark complaints.
The smartest thing TESSA does for SEM clients isn’t running better campaigns. It’s deciding which campaigns shouldn’t run at all. Most underperforming accounts spend more by trying less.
— TESSA Marketing & Technology
SEM Agency Pricing: What Search Engine Marketing Services Actually Cost
Pricing for SEM services varies more than most prospective clients realize. Some agencies charge flat monthly retainers. Some charge a percentage of ad spend. Some charge hourly. Some bundle SEM with other services. TESSA’s pricing is transparent, accountable to business outcomes, and structured around what actually delivers value to the client.
Industry-standard SEM agency pricing typically ranges from $3,000 to $20,000 per month for management fees, depending on account size and complexity, geographic scope, and the range of services included. Many search engine marketing firms charge a management fee that is a percentage of monthly advertising budget, and in the accounts we take over it is usually somewhere in the low double digits as a share of ad spend. This percentage-based pricing is simple and aligns agency revenue with client growth, but it can also create perverse incentives to grow the advertising budget regardless of return on investment.
TESSA’s SEM agency pricing is structured around the work actually being delivered, not a percentage of ad spend. We charge a transparent monthly retainer that covers strategy, account management, ad creation, landing page work, reporting, and the strategic attention that drives results. Marketing budgets vary by client; our fees scale with the complexity of the work, not with how much you spend on ads.
Small Business SEM
For small businesses with monthly ad spend under $10,000, PPC management starts at $1,500 a month plus ad spend. This tier covers Google Ads management, basic Bing if appropriate, monthly reporting, and quarterly strategic reviews. Most small business clients see meaningful results within 90 days.
Mid-Market SEM
For mid-market clients putting $10,000-$50,000 a month into ads, our SEM management fees typically run $1,500-$5,000 per month. This tier adds dedicated account management, weekly optimization, integrated landing page work, advanced audience targeting, and competitive intelligence reporting.
Enterprise SEM
For enterprise clients with $50,000+ in monthly ad spend, custom pricing applies. Enterprise programs include dedicated strategic leadership, multi-channel paid media coordination, custom reporting infrastructure, executive-level business reviews, and the resourcing required to manage complex paid search advertising at scale.
Every quote we provide includes the specific scope, deliverables, and reporting cadence we’ll commit to. No hidden fees, no surprise change orders, no “we’ll figure it out as we go.” If the scope changes partway through, we have a conversation before any pricing changes.
Industries TESSA’s Search Engine Marketing Serves
TESSA serves companies worldwide across a wide range of industries. Each industry has its own search marketing dynamics — buyer journey length, competitive intensity, click costs, regulatory constraints, conversion patterns — and our team has the depth to navigate them. Below are the industries where we have particular depth of experience.
B2B and Professional Services
Law firms, accounting firms, consultancies, financial services, and other professional services businesses use search engine marketing to generate qualified leads at a sustainable cost per lead. We’ve run SEM campaigns for professional services firms ranging from solo practitioners to multi-state enterprises.
E-Commerce and Retail
E-commerce businesses live or die by search marketing performance. Our work for ecommerce businesses includes Google Shopping campaigns, Performance Max campaigns for retail, dynamic remarketing, feed optimization, and the conversion rate optimization work that maximizes return on every paid click. Bing’s product ads are increasingly relevant for ecommerce too.
Software and Technology
SaaS, software, and technology companies need search engine marketing campaigns aligned with longer buying cycles, trial-and-conversion funnel dynamics, and the technical buyer audience that responds differently from consumer buyers. See our software and technology case studies.
Healthcare and Medical
Healthcare search engine advertising operates under unique constraints — HIPAA compliance considerations, Google’s healthcare advertising policies, and the patient intake dynamics that make healthcare SEM different from other verticals. Our team has the experience to navigate healthcare search marketing without compliance missteps.
Local Businesses and Multi-Location
Local businesses and multi-location franchises need geo-targeted search engine marketing that drives foot traffic and local conversion. We integrate map placements on search engines, location extensions, local inventory ads, and store visit tracking with broader search engine advertising. Combined with local SEO efforts, this is one of the highest-ROI marketing strategies available to local businesses.
Government, Nonprofit, and Education
Government contractors, nonprofit organizations, and educational institutions benefit from search engine marketing tailored to their unique audiences and compliance contexts. Nonprofits often qualify for Google Ad Grants ($10,000 per month in free advertising), which TESSA manages for qualifying nonprofit clients. See our Google Ad Grants page for details.
Performance Max Campaigns: What They Are and How TESSA Runs Them
Performance Max is the most heavily promoted campaign type and the future direction of online advertising. A Performance Max campaign uses Google’s machine learning across its full ecosystem (Search, Display, YouTube, Discover, Gmail, Maps) to deliver conversions based on the goals you set. The advertiser provides creative assets, conversion data, and audience signals. Google’s AI does the placement, targeting, and bid optimization.
Such campaigns currently account for a significant percentage of total spend on the platform. For some accounts, e-commerce especially, this campaign type delivers strong incremental return. For others, Performance Max cannibalizes existing Search campaign performance and reduces transparency into what’s actually working. The key skill in modern account management is knowing when Performance Max fits and when it doesn’t.
TESSA’s Approach to Performance Max
TESSA’s approach to Performance Max: we test it as a complement to traditional Search campaigns, never as a replacement until we’ve proven incremental value. We feed it the highest-quality creative assets and conversion data we can. We monitor for cannibalization through experimentation. And we don’t accept “the campaign is performing” as an answer without seeing the underlying placement and audience data — even when the reporting interface tries to obscure it.
Demand Gen Campaigns: Google’s Next-Generation Visual Advertising
Demand Gen campaigns replaced Discovery Ads in 2024 and have become a key channel for top-of-funnel awareness and consideration-stage marketing. Demand Gen runs visual ads on YouTube (including Shorts), Discover, and Gmail: the surfaces where consumers spend time when they’re not actively searching.
When Demand Gen Makes Sense
For brands that need to build awareness with audiences who haven’t yet started searching for their category, Demand Gen offers something the traditional Search campaign can’t: efficient reach across the moments before active intent. For e-commerce, lifestyle, and consumer brands especially, Demand Gen has become a meaningful complement to lower-funnel search marketing.
How TESSA Runs Demand Gen Campaigns
Our search marketing agency runs Demand Gen campaigns alongside traditional Search and Performance Max for clients whose marketing funnel benefits from reaching buyers earlier. The creative requirements are different (strong video, attention-grabbing imagery, brand-led messaging) and so is the measurement. View-through conversions matter more here than last-click attribution does in Search.
AI Overviews and the New Search Landscape
Google’s AI Overviews have changed how search results pages work. For many informational queries, AI Overviews now provide a synthesized answer at the top of the search results — reducing the click-through rate on organic results below. This has direct implications for both SEO and search engine marketing strategy.
Why Paid Placements Have Become More Valuable
The counterintuitive result: search marketing has become more valuable, not less, as AI Overviews compress the organic results area. Buyers who would have clicked through ten unpaid listings now see one AI summary and three paid placements above the fold. For commercial queries — the queries that drive actual buying behavior — paid placement visibility now occupies a larger share of the available attention than it did before AI Overviews launched.
TESSA’s Two-Part Response to AI Overviews
TESSA’s response to the AI Overviews landscape combines two strategies. First, we lean harder into SEO for the queries where AI Overviews are likely to surface, focusing on getting cited as a source. Second, we adjust SEM strategy to capture the increased value of paid placements on commercial intent queries that AI Overviews don’t yet meaningfully reduce. See our AI search optimization guide for the broader context.
Microsoft Advertising and Other Search Engines’ Comeback Story
Bing Ads, Microsoft’s search engine platform, was a forgotten channel for years. The integration of OpenAI’s technology in 2023, followed by the deeper Copilot integration, has changed the picture. The platform now drives meaningful incremental volume for many SEM accounts, especially in B2B and older-demographic consumer verticals.
The Economics of Bing Advertising in 2026
The arithmetic is straightforward. Bing’s cost per click is typically lower than Google’s for the same buyer intent. The conversion rates can be comparable for many B2B verticals. The audience overlap across search engines is not 100%: there are real buyers there you can’t reach through Google alone. For some TESSA clients, Bing delivers 15-25% of total conversions for far less money.
The catch: the platform’s tools, automation, and audience targeting still lag Google’s. Running it effectively requires hands-on management from people who understand its specific quirks – bid strategies that work differently, audience definitions that don’t translate one-to-one, and reporting interfaces that require manual export for most useful analysis. We’ve run Bing campaigns long enough to have built the operational muscle most agencies lack.
For every client, we focus on the search engines that drive real value rather than chasing every new launch or fad. We invest in the search engines that have proven they can drive measurable results for our clients’ industries, primarily Google and Bing, and add other search engines where the audience justifies the management overhead.
Working With TESSA’s Search Engine Marketing Team
For prospective clients evaluating our search engine marketing services, knowing what the working relationship looks like in practice is as useful as evaluating capabilities on paper. Here’s what working with TESSA looks like once an engagement starts.
Free Discovery Call
Every client relationship starts with a free discovery call with senior TESSA leadership. We discuss your business, your current search marketing results, your goals, and where you’ve been frustrated by previous agency relationships. The call is genuinely no-pressure and produces real marketing advice you can use whether or not you ultimately work with TESSA.
Account and Analytics Audit
If you decide to engage, we begin with a comprehensive search engine account and analytics audit. This produces a written report identifying what’s working, what’s broken, what’s wasting budget, and what the highest-value first 30 days of work should focus on.
Dedicated Strategic Lead
Every TESSA client is assigned a senior strategic lead who serves as the primary point of contact throughout the engagement. The strategic lead schedules kickoff meetings, sets the strategic agenda, coordinates between TESSA team members, and ensures the client gets senior-level marketing advice at every decision point.
Regular Reporting and Communication
Monthly reports, weekly status updates as needed, and direct access to your strategic lead via email, phone, or Slack. We don’t bury clients in dashboards. We deliver the specific insights that matter for the next set of decisions — backed by the underlying data when clients want to dig deeper.
Quarterly Business Reviews
Every quarter we run a formal business review with client leadership. The review covers campaign performance, business outcomes attributable to search marketing, opportunities for budget reallocation, strategic questions on the horizon, and the next quarter’s roadmap. These reviews are how we maintain alignment between campaign execution and broader business strategy.
Honest Marketing Advice
Throughout our work together, TESSA provides honest marketing advice, including when the right answer is “you shouldn’t spend that money on search advertising right now.” We’ve talked clients out of campaign expansions, paused budgets when conditions weren’t right, and recommended competitors when we weren’t the right fit. The long-term partnership matters more than the short-term retainer.
SEM and SEO: Why TESSA Runs Both Under One Roof
Most digital marketing agencies specialize in either search engine marketing or search engine optimization — not both. TESSA is a digital marketing agency specializing in the full search marketing ecosystem. Running both an SEM agency and an SEO agency under one roof produces compounding advantages that single-discipline agencies can’t match.
The integration is real, not marketing copy. Our paid search team shares data with our SEO team. SEO flags keyword opportunities that should be defended with ads. The SEM side identifies high-converting queries that deserve organic content. Budget allocation decisions between paid and organic happen with both teams in the room. Reporting connects paid and organic performance for a unified view of total search visibility.
Unified Keyword Strategy
Our search engine optimization and SEM teams share keyword data. We don’t run separate keyword research processes for SEO and paid. The same comprehensive keyword strategy informs both, with intent-based segmentation determining which queries are best served by SEM ads versus content built to rank.
Total Search Visibility Reporting
Most clients want to know how visible their business is in search results overall, not paid and SEO numbers in separate reports. Our reporting combines paid and organic data to show total search visibility, share of voice on critical queries, and the combined impact of SEM and SEO.
SEO-Informed Landing Page Strategy
The landing pages we build for search engine marketing campaigns are also built to rank. This dual-purpose approach means the landing page investment compounds over time: paid traffic in the short term, organic traffic in the long term. Single-discipline SEM agencies rarely think about SEO this way.
Coordinated SERP Strategy
For high-value queries, owning multiple positions in the search engine results page is the goal — paid placement at the top, organic listing below, knowledge panel if applicable, video result, image result. Our coordinated strategy maximizes the total real estate you own on the search engines, paid and organic.
SEO Campaigns That Inform SEM
Insights from SEO campaigns feed directly into SEM campaigns. Search Console data reveals queries that drive clicks but underperform compared to peers — these are immediate SEM opportunities. Schema and structured data work for SEO also benefits ad extensions and rich results.
Budget Allocation Discipline
The most important strategic question many clients face is how to split budget between paid search advertising and SEO. Running both under one roof means we can answer that question honestly rather than defending whichever budget we happen to manage.
For the full picture of TESSA’s SEO services, see our SEO services page and our complete guide to SEO.
Social Media Marketing and Paid Social: How It Fits
Search engine marketing reaches buyers at the moment of active intent. Social media marketing reaches buyers in the moments before they search. Both have a role in a complete digital marketing strategy, and most TESSA clients eventually engage us for both.
Our social media marketing work spans organic content strategy and paid social advertising across Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, X (Twitter), TikTok, and YouTube. Social media management at TESSA includes content calendar development, community engagement, paid amplification, and the analytics infrastructure that ties social activity to business outcomes.
For the deep dive on TESSA’s social media marketing capabilities — paid social platforms, content production, social commerce, influencer programs, and the integration between organic social and paid social — see our paid search and social ads page. This page focuses on search engine marketing; that page focuses on social.
Across the major search engines, the auction mechanics differ in subtle ways. Google’s auction weights quality score heavily and rewards advertisers who invest in landing page experience. Bing’s auction has slightly different bid mechanics and audience signals. Knowing how the search engines differ is part of what makes specialized expertise valuable: generic digital marketing teams that treat every platform the same way leave money on the table, and the gap between average and excellent results on the search engines often comes down to operational details.
The future of search engines is increasingly AI-driven. Google, Bing, and emerging search engines all use machine learning to determine which ads appear, which audiences see them, and which bids win. Working effectively with AI-driven search engines means feeding the systems quality data (conversion signals, audience information, creative assets) so they can optimize on the right signals. Search engines that don’t receive quality input data produce poor output regardless of bid level.
How Search Engine Marketing Fits Into a Complete Digital Marketing Strategy
Search engine marketing is a powerful channel, but it’s most effective inside a coordinated digital marketing strategy. TESSA’s capabilities span the full digital marketing ecosystem: search engine marketing, SEO, social media marketing, content marketing, email marketing, conversion rate optimization, and analytics. As a digital marketing agency that delivers all of these capabilities, we coordinate digital marketing campaigns across channels rather than optimizing one channel in isolation.
Why Single-Channel Agencies Fall Short
Most companies hire a digital marketing agency to solve a specific channel problem — paid search isn’t working, organic traffic is flat, social engagement is weak. TESSA’s approach is different: we start with the broader digital marketing strategy and figure out which channels deserve investment, in what proportion, with what coordination between them.
The Integrated Customer Journey
The digital marketing landscape in 2026 favors integration. Customer journeys span multiple touchpoints: a buyer might see a video ad, search for the brand on Google, read a blog post, click a retargeting display ad, see a social post from the company, and finally convert through a paid search click. An agency that specializes in a single channel misses the bigger picture. One that integrates every channel captures it.
Our integrated approaches for clients typically combine paid search, SEO, social media marketing, and conversion rate optimization into a coordinated program. The exact mix depends on the business — some clients are heavy on paid advertising, others rely on organic traffic from SEO, others find their leverage in social media marketing and content. The right campaign reflects the specific business, not a one-size-fits-all template.
What to Look for in a Digital Marketing Agency
For businesses evaluating digital marketing agencies, the integration question comes first. A digital marketing agency that runs paid search but outsources SEO will struggle to coordinate the two. One that does content but not paid amplification will leave content reach on the table. A digital marketing agency that handles all digital marketing under one roof can make tradeoffs that single-channel vendors can’t.
Integrated Paid and Organic Digital Marketing
Our approach integrates paid search engine marketing with organic SEO. The two reinforce each other: ads deliver immediate visibility while SEO compounds returns over time. Marketing strategies that coordinate both channels consistently outperform those that optimize each in isolation.
Cross-Channel Digital Marketing Coordination
Digital marketing channels work better together than alone. Email marketing fuels remarketing audience targeting in search engine marketing. Content marketing feeds keyword research for SEO. Social media marketing drives branded search lift that improves paid search results. Our digital marketing agency coordinates these dependencies intentionally.
Strategies for B2B
B2B marketing efforts look different from B2C. Longer buying cycles, multiple stakeholders, smaller absolute search volume but higher per-conversion value, and dependence on LinkedIn as a primary social platform. We develop B2B tailored approaches that match these distinct dynamics.
Strategies for E-Commerce
E-commerce marketing efforts prioritize conversion-driven channels — paid search, Google Shopping, Performance Max for retail, Meta retargeting, email-driven repurchase campaigns. We design e-commerce digital marketing strategies built for measurable revenue contribution from each channel.
Local Marketing Strategies
For local businesses, marketing efforts center on local search engine marketing, Google Business Profile optimization, local SEO content, and review generation. We design tailored campaigns that drive foot traffic and local conversion at a sustainable cost per lead.
Enterprise Marketing Strategies
Enterprise marketing efforts coordinate large budgets across multiple business units, geographic markets, and product lines. Our digital marketing agency builds enterprise programs with the governance, reporting, and stakeholder coordination that complex organizations require.
How Search Engine Marketing Improves Your Online Visibility
Online visibility is the foundation of digital growth. Without it, the best products and services in the world go unnoticed. Search engine marketing is the most direct way to enhance online visibility: paying for placement in front of buyers searching for exactly what your business offers. Companies that work at this systematically, through ads and SEO, consistently outperform those who treat it as an afterthought.
Your website’s visibility in search engines determines how much qualified traffic you receive. A website with strong search presence shows up for the queries its buyers actually search. A website with weak search presence loses those queries to rivals who invested in paid advertising, SEO, or both. The compounding effect over time is significant — every month of poor online visibility is qualified traffic and revenue lost to the businesses that did invest.
How to Measure Online Visibility
The metrics that measure online visibility are clear: how often your brand appears for relevant queries. Website traffic measures how much of that visibility converts into actual site visits. Qualified traffic — visitors with genuine commercial intent — is what ultimately drives revenue from these investments. We track each layer and optimize the conversion rate between them.
Paid placements deliver the most immediate presence gains. A search engine marketing campaign can place your business at the top of results within hours of going live. Unlike SEO, which takes months to compound, paid advertising delivers measurable presence from day one. This is why most companies start with ads while their SEO investment matures.
Combining Paid and Organic for Maximum Visibility
The most effective digital marketing strategies combine ads for immediate visibility with SEO for long-term compounding results. Used together, the two build visibility faster than either alone. TESSA’s clients typically see meaningful website traffic improvements within 30 days of launch and sustained growth in qualified visits over 12-18 months of consistent investment.
Paid Advertising for Fast Online Visibility
Paid advertising delivers immediate online visibility gains. Our campaigns get you seen within days of going live by placing your business in front of high-intent buyers actively searching for your category. For most businesses, it is the fastest lever available to enhance online visibility.
SEO for Compounding Online Visibility
Search engine optimization compounds your website’s visibility over time. Where paid campaigns deliver immediate website traffic, SEO creates organic traffic that grows month over month without ongoing ad spend. Combining the two is the most cost-effective way to grow visibility long term.
Brand Search Presence
Branded search presence — how often your brand appears for searches that include your business name — is foundational to total visibility. Our search engine marketing work includes defending branded search presence from competitor conquesting and growing branded demand.
Competitive Visibility Analysis
Competitive analysis identifies the queries where your competitors outrank you and the opportunities you’re missing. Our digital marketing agency runs quarterly competitive analyses for clients to spot threats and opportunities early.
Website Traffic Diversification
Healthy website traffic comes from multiple sources — paid search, organic search, direct visits, referrals, and social media. Concentrated dependence on any single website traffic source creates business risk. Our digital marketing strategies diversify website traffic across channels to reduce single-channel risk.
Qualified Traffic Optimization
Total website traffic counts for less than qualified traffic: visitors with genuine commercial intent. We optimize for qualified traffic by refining keyword targeting, tightening audience definitions, and continuously cutting the queries that drive unqualified traffic. The result: more revenue per advertising dollar.
PPC Management Services and How They Differ From Generic Marketing
Many businesses come to TESSA looking for PPC management after working with general marketing agencies that don’t specialize in paid search. PPC management is its own discipline — distinct from SEO, content marketing, and social media marketing — and PPC management done well requires specialized expertise in auction dynamics, bid strategy, conversion tracking, and the constantly evolving ad platforms of the major search engines.
What Our PPC Services Include
Our PPC services cover everything from initial account audits through ongoing campaign management and strategic reporting. PPC ads on Google search and Bing are different from social media marketing campaigns, display ads, or video ads — they require specific PPC management expertise that general digital marketing agencies often lack. The agencies that get the best results in PPC management focus on it as a core capability, not a sideline service.
PPC management services for our clients typically include keyword strategy and management, ad copy creation and testing, bid strategy optimization, conversion tracking implementation, landing page work, audience segmentation, and integrated reporting. We run PPC ads and SEM campaigns across Google Ads, Bing, and the broader search ecosystem — coordinating PPC ads with display advertising, social media marketing, and other digital marketing channels for maximum impact.
Custom Campaign Architecture
The ad campaigns we build aren’t generic templates copied from previous clients. Every account is custom to the specific business: keyword targeting, campaign architecture, bid strategy, creative direction, and landing pages all built around the client’s unique goals. Tailored strategies consistently outperform copy-paste templates that work for nobody in particular.
How Social Media Fits With Paid Search
Social media marketing and social media management are related but distinct from search engine marketing. Social media marketing reaches buyers in the moments before they search — building awareness, demand, and brand affinity through organic and paid social content. Social media management handles the ongoing operational work: content scheduling, community engagement, response monitoring, and crisis management. Both social media marketing and social media management complement search engine marketing but operate on different platforms with different mechanics.
For clients running paid ads across multiple platforms, we coordinate ad campaigns across Google, Bing, social media marketing, display, and video into a single integrated search marketing agency program. The result: paid ads that compound across channels rather than competing with each other for attention and budget. See our paid search and social ads page for our specific social media marketing capabilities.
Tailored Strategies for Different Business Types
The best approach depends on the specific business. A solo professional services firm has very different requirements than a multi-state ecommerce business or a B2B SaaS company with a six-month sales cycle. Generic programs fail because they don’t account for differences. TESSA’s tailored approaches start with the specific business context and build outward.
For ecommerce businesses, our tailored strategies typically combine Google Shopping campaigns, Performance Max for retail, dynamic remarketing, Meta paid social, email-driven retention, and conversion rate optimization. Ecommerce programs prioritize fast iteration: testing new creative weekly, optimizing product feeds, refining audience targeting based on actual purchase data.
Tailored Approach for B2B Services
For B2B service businesses, tailored strategies look different. LinkedIn paid campaigns, account-based campaigns, content marketing investment, SEO strategy focused on commercial-intent queries, and event-based marketing all play larger roles. The marketing efforts for B2B services often include longer-cycle nurture campaigns that span months rather than weeks.
The SEO strategy that supports our marketing efforts is just as tailored. An SEO agency that runs the same SEO strategy for every client gets the same mediocre results for every client. Our SEO strategy starts with the specific business’s competitive context, search opportunity, and content capacity. SEO agency work that’s tailored to the business consistently outperforms cookie-cutter programs from generic providers.
Our approach varies by business too. A high-volume consumer ecommerce business has very different needs than a B2B services firm with a long sales cycle. Decisions on bid strategy, audience targeting, creative approach, and landing pages all reflect the specific business reality. The SEM campaigns we run for ecommerce businesses look almost nothing like the ones we run for B2B services firms.
What stays consistent across our tailored approaches is the discipline. Every program starts with discovery to understand the specific business. Every marketing strategy is built on actual data, not generic best practices. Every set of SEM campaigns is tracked rigorously and optimized continuously. Every campaign review ties back to business outcomes.
Our search marketing services also go beyond paid placements: keyword research, content strategy, technical site work, and the broader investment that drives both paid and organic results. Companies that treat search marketing as just paid placements miss the larger opportunity.
Frequently Asked Questions About Search Engine Marketing
What’s the difference between SEM and SEO?
Search engine marketing (SEM) typically refers to paid search advertising — buying placement in search results through platforms like Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising. Search engine optimization (SEO) refers to the technical, content, and link-earning work that improves organic search rankings without paying for placement directly.
The terminology gets confusing because some older usage of “SEM” included both paid and organic search. In modern usage, SEM is almost always shorthand for search engine marketing. Both disciplines work toward the same goal — visibility in search results — but through different mechanisms.
How much should my business spend on search engine marketing?
The right SEM budget depends on your business economics: customer lifetime value, target cost per lead or sale, conversion rate from click to customer, and growth goals. There’s no universal formula. Across our own client base, B2B budgets usually put a modest share of total marketing spend into paid search, and e-commerce clients go higher because the click-to-purchase loop is fast.
A useful starting point: calculate what you can afford to pay per qualified lead or per sale, then work backward through expected conversion rates to determine your maximum acceptable cost per click. From there, test budget levels and scale based on actual return on ad spend.
How long does it take to see results from SEM?
Faster than SEO, but not instant. Most accounts show meaningful signal within 14-30 days of launch — enough data to assess campaign structure, ad copy performance, and initial conversion patterns. Reliable performance benchmarks typically establish themselves over 60-90 days as Smart Bidding accumulates conversion data and the account stabilizes.
The first 30 days usually involve significant adjustments. The 60-90 day window is where most accounts find their footing. Real scaling typically happens after 6 months of disciplined optimization.
What’s the typical click through rate for paid search ads?
Click through rates for sem ads vary significantly by industry, position, and query intent. WordStream’s 2026 Google Ads benchmarks, drawn from more than 13,000 US search campaigns run between April 2025 and March 2026, put the average search click-through rate at 6.64%, with a wide spread by industry. Branded terms run higher again, and display and video ads run dramatically lower.
These rates are useful diagnostics but shouldn’t be optimized in isolation. A high click through rate on irrelevant queries wastes ad spend. The metrics that matter are conversion rate, cost per acquisition, and return on ad spend.
Do I need landing pages, or can paid traffic go to my homepage?
Paid search traffic should almost never go to a generic homepage. Landing pages built specifically for the campaign — matching the ad’s promise, optimized for a single conversion action, removing distractions — consistently outperform homepage traffic by 2-5x on conversion rate. The investment in dedicated landing pages pays back quickly through improved campaign ROI.
Landing pages also let you tailor the experience for different audience segments, test variations, and measure performance at the page level. Generic homepages can’t do any of this.
What’s Performance Max and should I use it?
Performance Max is Google’s AI-driven campaign type that uses machine learning to deliver conversions across Google’s full ad inventory — Search, Display, YouTube, Discover, Gmail, Maps. The advertiser provides creative assets, conversion data, and audience signals, and Google’s AI handles placement, bidding, and audience targeting.
Performance Max works well for some advertisers, especially e-commerce, but can cannibalize other Google Ads campaigns and reduce transparency. The right answer depends on your business, your existing account structure, and your tolerance for trading transparency for automation. We test Performance Max as a complement, never blindly as a replacement.
Should I run Bing search advertising in addition to Google Ads?
For most accounts spending more than $5,000 per month on Google Ads, yes. Bing typically delivers a smaller volume of conversions at a lower cost per click — incremental conversions you can’t reach through Google search alone. The additional management overhead is real, but the math usually works for accounts past a certain spend threshold.
The exception: very small accounts where the additional management complexity isn’t justified by the incremental volume. For those clients, we focus all campaign effort there.
How is privacy regulation affecting paid search performance?
Third-party cookie deprecation, Apple’s app tracking changes, Google Consent Mode v2, and tightening GDPR/CCPA enforcement have made conversion tracking dramatically harder than it was five years ago. Accounts routinely lose a meaningful portion of their measurable conversions to attribution gaps.
The response is enhanced conversions, server-side tagging, first-party data activation, and modeled conversions that fill the gaps left by lost tracking. This infrastructure work is foundational for modern search engine marketing and is included in every TESSA engagement by default.
Ready to Improve Your Search Engine Marketing Results?
If you’re evaluating search engine marketing services — whether you’re starting paid search from scratch, replacing an underperforming agency, or scaling an in-house program — the next step is a free strategy call with TESSA.
The call is genuinely free, no-pressure, and designed to leave you with real marketing advice you can use whether or not you ultimately hire us. We’ll review your current paid search results, identify the biggest opportunities, and give you a clear sense of what working with TESSA would look like.
What you get: A 30-minute call with senior TESSA leadership. Specific recommendations based on your current account. No sales pitch you have to sit through.
What it costs: 30 minutes of your time. No obligation.
Who it’s for: Business owners, marketing leaders, and CMOs evaluating search engine marketing services, Google Ads management, Bing campaigns, or broader paid media strategy.
Book My Free Strategy Call or call 703-214-9555 to speak with someone immediately.
For broader context on TESSA’s capabilities, see our SEO services, our paid search and social ads page, our local SEO services, and our case studies library.
