Search Engine Marketing and Search Engine Optimization
SEO Your Ticket To The Online Marketing Game
Isn't this remarkable? Search Engine Watch reported that 12 Billion U.S. Searches were conducted in July. Google totaled 9.9 billion of those searches. And this is just in the U.S.! Do you know anyone who doesn't Google?
Fact is, if you're not visible on search engines then you're customers are finding you're competitors. If you're a little overwhelmed by all this, fear not, Clay Ant Creative is here to help you make sense of all this SEO and SEM stuff.
Search Engine Marketing Explained In Simple Words?
Search engine marketing (SEM) is any online marketing activity that brings traffic from search engines to your website. SEM is an umbrella term that includes the following search engine marketing tactics.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC)
- Link Building
There's more about these in the next paragraph but first you must know that there are 2 types of search results. Organic search results and paid search results.
A quick comparison between organic and paid search results:
| Organic search results | Paid search results |
|---|---|
| Results display on the left hand side of SERPs | Results display on the right hand side of SERPs |
| Long term investment but high ROI | Quick low cost setup |
| Can be tough to quantify | Highly measurable |
| Higher trust factor | Paid for means biased results |
| Takes lots of ongoing work | Can be more expensive if not managed well |
| Results take while to be seen | Results are instant |
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
The main purpose of SEO is to improve your website's position in organic search results for specific keywords or key phrases. There are 4 very important SEO basics that must work together to get the best possible organic search results.
- SEO friendly website: You're website must have search engine friendly structure
- Keywords and key phrases: research is necessary to find out what phrases people are using to search for your products and services
- Web Copy: Your website copy must be optimized with these keywords and key phrases
- Link building: This refers to quality inbound links from other websites to yours.
Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC)
PPC ads are the links you see on the right hand side of a search engine results page (SERP). PPC is an advertising system where the advertiser only pays for each click. It works on a bidding system where advertisers bid on keywords and key phrases. The highest bid gets better ranking. However there are other factors that influence the ranking such as relevancy and click through rate.
Link Building
Link building, also known as link popularity, involves many different types of promotional activities intended to grow the number and quality of inbound links to a web site. The purpose of link building is to boost your websites relevancy to search engines. E.g. if Google notices that site A, B, C and D, who has relatively similar content than yours, link to your website then Google will see your site as having quality content too. This increases your websites credibility and legitimacy in Google's eyes.
