According to recent estimates, the total search volume of Google is approximately 3.5 Billion per month. The sheer search volume indicates the advertising potential of this medium because these 3.5 Billion searches are done by people who want an answer to a certain problem or simply want to research about a product they want to buy or maybe gain any kind of information.

Let me explain this with an example, suppose you want to buy a mobile phone and want to find out whether it’s a good buy or not. So what do you do? You go on the search engine and find out more about its specifications, reviews, watch un-boxing videos, etc. Once you are truly satisfied about the product you place an order on the e-commerce site or you go buy that product offline. So it is clear that a search engine is capable of influencing your buying decision one way or the other.

That’s why companies use search engines to market their product to you and influence your buying decisions. They can do it the paid way or the organic way. The paid way is when they buy ads on the search engines through the use of some native SEM tool such as Google Adwords for Google or they can do it the organic way in which they enhance the search engine rankings of their website by increasing their search engine reputation so that they catch you right at the first page of Google. The first page of Google is the most coveted place for any website since this is where most of the traffic is. This process of gaining search engine visibility either through paid methods or organic methods is known as Search Engine Marketing.

This is how an ad looks on Google when a customer searches for the keyword ” buy mobile”:

Notice the Sponsored and Ad section highlighted in the image.

Furthermore, take a look at the organic search results on the image below for the same keyword “buy mobile.”

Both the paid and the organic results can influence the buying decision of a person searching for the keyword “buy mobile” assuming that the person is actually looking forward to buy a mobile phone.