Marketers are increasingly adding search marketing to impact their campaigns. While many understand the vital role search can play in campaign success, they don’t necessarily have the knowledge to use it themselves. In fact, C-level executives who leave all search knowledge in the hands of the “experts” are doing their company a disservice; all of today’s marketing professionals should have a basic understanding of how search works and how to use it. The better you understand search as a function, the bigger impact you can create for your company.
One of the biggest steps you can take towards using search effectively is understanding the difference between SEO and SEM, a comparison that can seem daunting to many. Here’s the breakdown…
SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the process of increasing visibility in organic, unpaid search results, and it is essentially based on a site’s content. To use it successfully, you must combine quality content with traffic and popularity. Merging those two things with accessibility – making sure your web presence is user-friendly – is the key to showing up well above the competition on a SERP (search engine results page).
Only 47% of searchers can distinguish paid ads from organic results, but organic results are only number one in 9% of searches. SEO offers free results over an extended period of time, but not without an initial investment. Time and funding are required to provide your site with the following SEO components: optimized meta data, quality page copy, relevant blog content, clean URLs, fast loading times and social integration. These website qualities work best when paired with an extensive digital community that contributes to social sharing, backlinks and bookmarking.
SEO is cheaper than SEM, but it is only powerful when combined with quality content development and an active social community, so the overall investment of time can be quite comparable to SEM.
SEM, or Search Engine Marketing, is the process of increasing visibility in search results through paid optimizations and advertising. PPC, or Pay Per Click, listings are a key player in SEM, but success lies in the marriage of content that is relevant to the search and the money invested in the ad. Google AdWords, for example, gives your ad a quality rating connected to its content relevance that directly influences your keyword rates. By doing this, AdWords makes it easy to find out how much a search ad will cost and how likely it is to appear on the first SERP.
A strategic SEM campaign can be a fantastic way for a new business to gain rapid exposure, if the budget is available. Over time, increased popularity will lead to more exposure through organic search results, but high visibility is hard to achieve organically, particularly when so many companies are ahead.
Maximum search engine success is found by combining SEO and SEM, using paid ads to increase visibility that will eventually become organic. Both need long term maintenance, whether it be in terms of quality content, social sharing or financial backing.
Understanding SEO and SEM will have a direct impact on your future marketing campaigns!
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