Search Engine Marketing Benefits: Why SEM Is a Game-Changer
Need more eyes on your business? Search engine marketing is your best bet. Learn all about it here....
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Search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) are two of the most common terms under that big ol’ “online marketing” umbrella.
With only a single letter of difference, how different can they be?
Turns out, quite a bit.
SEM stands for search engine marketing. And as the name suggests, SEM aims to improve your performance and visibility on search engine results pages (SERPs) through various marketing strategies.
These strategies can include a combination of pay-per-click advertising (i.e. PPC) and organic strategies (SEO).
SEO stands for search engine optimization. It broadly encompasses all “non-paid” strategies that help you appear higher on search engine results pages (i.e. not ads).
This can include content marketing, linking strategies, and technical improvements to your website — like increasing speed and simplifying navigation.
Obviously these strategies aren’t free. This just means we don’t pay the search engine to appear at the top of the results page — those are for paid ads (PPC) only. Ranking #1 (or as a snippet) is all about high-quality content on a high-quality website.
It can help to understand how Google’s algorithm works and tweak your website according to the 200+ search ranking factors to better comply with rules, optimize content, and be more appealing to searchers.
SEO strategies can be broken down into a few major categories. These are:
Together, these elements are the bulk of what we consider SEO, which is a significant component of SEM.
SEO is often part of an SEM strategy. Therefore, SEO is a subcategory of SEM, alongside PPC. And with so many acronyms, there’s bound to be confusion.
Some consider PPC and SEM to be synonymous. They believe SEM to be just the paid half of online marketing, while SEO is the organic half.
But we’re here to clear things up.
SEM is a Venn diagram: SEO is one circle, PPC is on the other, and SEM is where the two overlap.
Here are some notable differences between SEO and PPC:
The first difference is money. While you can do SEO for “free,” PPC is pay-to-play. PPC involves paying Google (or Bing, Yahoo, Amazon, or any other form of search engine) for a spot in the search results.
SEO, on the other hand, only requires paying for the people, agencies, and tools that assist in your efforts to rank higher — rather than giving money to Google directly.
How much do SEO and PPC cost? The answer is as much or as little as you want. SEO can be performed for free or cheap, though the results you get may not be effective.
And while you can run PPC ads cheaply, the results are just as small as the investment. Large brands have large budgets, befitting the number of digits on all the numbers they use.
The second difference is time. Time applies in two ways: how long it takes to start working and how long the impact lasts.
In terms of longevity, the same dichotomy holds:
This phenomenon is primarily why both SEO and PPC advertising complement each other well. SEO starts slow and takes a long time to build up, while PPC begins almost immediately.
Further, you’re less likely to have PPC success without strong SEO. If your ad directs a prospect to a poorly written landing page, you’re probably going to miss out on a conversion.
High-quality web pages = conversion rate
The third difference is in keywords. Keyword research is at the core of both SEO and PPC. However, the types of keywords that work best and the metrics that you’re looking at will vary.
When performing keyword research, you’ll find specific keywords have different intents behind them. These intents are:
Informational and tutorial keywords tend to perform best for SEO and are less effective for PPC.
If your goal is to get your target audience to download a checklist, for example, PPC ads can probably get some downloads and provide value. However, you may want to let SEO handle these early-stage inquiries and focus on more purchase-ready keywords for your PPC campaigns.
Commercial and transactional keywords tend to perform best with PPC, though properly-formulated quality content can also work well for SEO. PPC tends to be most relevant when it has a tangible offer for the user and a concrete, easy-to-calculate return on investment.
A massive part of effective SEM is understanding the intent behind a search term and sculpting the marketing campaign you use to reach that intent most effectively.
“SEM” covers the bulk of your online advertising, while “SEO” is just one of the tools at your disposal, alongside PPC.
Your digital marketing strategy will depend on your goals, targeted keywords, budget, the quality of your site, your competition, and more.
Finding the right balance between SEO and PPC is essential in SEM. That’s why powerful tools like ConversionIQ exist. We created this platform to help you easily monitor and optimize your campaigns, resulting in better performance and higher ROI.
The question is, where do you put your budget? Can you write more content for organic traffic and SEO results, pay for high-quality tools to improve your overall marketing, or give Google money directly to give you more exposure and website traffic?
The choice is yours.
Need more eyes on your business? Search engine marketing is your best bet. Learn all about it here....
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