Differences Between SEO & SEM

Let’s start with some key differences between SEO and SEM. As we discussed above, SEO is used to get your website to rank in the regular search engine results, commonly called organic search results in the digital marketing industry. Conversely, SEM is paying to place your ads with your website information in specific locations, including above or next to search engine results.

Both the organic and the paid sides of search results can be highly competitive, but they offer very different value propositions. For example, while SEO tends to be highly effective in the long term, it can take 6 to 12 months — or even more depending on competition levels — to see consistent results from your SEO efforts. You also must continue to optimize and refresh your online presence in order to maintain rankings. With SEM, on the other hand, you can see placement of your listing almost immediately but maintaining that placement requires upkeep and a constant infusion of money.

One of the best analogies we’ve heard for the difference between SEO and SEM is to think of it like losing weight via diet and exercise or via plastic surgery. SEO, like losing weight through diet and exercise, takes time to be effective, requires constant attention to details, and still requires work to maintain once the desired results have been achieved. SEM is more like using liposuction to take the pounds off. The results are fast and dramatic, but require money and constant upkeep in order to be maintained.

Key Components of SEM

• Cohesive Campaigns

When you work in SEM, as in traditional advertising, you work in campaigns. A campaign is simply a series of ads that share a common theme and are designed to work together. In SEM, you create your ad campaigns to target specific, relevant keywords. The most effective campaigns are cohesive; they tie everything — your keywords, your ad groups, etc. — together so that you aren’t putting out conflicting messages with your ads.

We sometimes call this the Princess Theory. Chris Parrett, one of our SEM Specialists, says that “The Princess Theory refers to a little girl’s princess-themed birthday party. Everything — from the decorations to the cake to the party favors — matches the theme. Similarly, your AdWords, ad groups, and campaign as a whole need to match the same theme.”

• Relevant Ad Placement

Another way to make sure that your ads are as successful as possible is to make sure that your ad is relevant to where it is being placed. Going back to our event analogy, placing fliers for a golf tournament in a sporting goods shop is likely to yield better results than placing them in a sewing machine store. Of course, you want people to click on your ads. But, ultimately, you want people to see and click on your ad who are interested in your solution. What you have to understand is that it doesn’t matter how many people see your ad if the people who see your ad aren’t interested in what you have to offer.

The best ad placements are contextual to what the person seeing the ad is doing, seeing or reading at that time. Think of the last time you were late getting to the theater. You probably didn’t miss the beginning of your movie, but you may have missed some of the previews. Were you disappointed at missing the previews? If not, do you know someone who would be? The answer is probably yes. However, the question that arises is, why? Why would somebody be disappointed when they miss movie trailers? After all, they’re just ads.

The answer may surprise you. Most people don’t like to miss the previews before a movie because they actually want to be advertised to under these circumstances. The ads are contextual to what they are doing and it actually adds to the experience instead of detracting from it. Contextual advertising — advertising goods or services that are related to what somebody is doing, seeing or reading — has been shown to be highly effective. Because of this, context and relevance are the key to success in online advertising.

• Understanding Ad Rank and Ad Position

When working with paid search platforms like Google AdWords or Bing Ads, your ad position refers to where your ad falls among the ads placed around specific search results. In a traditional advertising auction, the person who is willing to pay the most gets the best placement. That’s not necessarily true in ad placement bidding for search engines.

Google Ad Rank and other search engines’ ranking determinations actually involve a combination of different factors. Remember, search engines are trying to give the best and most relevant information they can to their users so that those users will return and use their services again. That’s why most search engines use custom algorithms to determine ad placement based on factors like bid and relevance. And on most Pay-Per-Click ad platforms, including Google AdWords, you only pay when your ad is clicked on.

• Google Ad Rank:

Let’s take a closer look at how Google Ad Rank is determined to illustrate how ad position is determined. Hal Varian, Google’s Chief Economist, says that they use a variation of what’s called a second price auction for ad placement. In a second price advertising auction, the advertiser doesn’t have to pay their full bid, they only have to pay enough to beat the next highest bidder below them.

Key Components of SEO

Your SEO strategy should begin with these questions:

• Who is your ideal customer?

• Where are they located?

• Where do they spend their time online?

• What words and terms might they use to search for companies like yours?

• What is their likely intent behind each search query?

Relevant, Useful and Important

In its true form, however, SEO is making sure that your website is following specific, best practices so that Google and other search engines can see and rank your website. Put another way, SEO is creating or improving your website — sometimes in ways that aren’t visible — so that the search engines recognize it as being relevant, useful, and important in regards to the question asked by a searcher.

You should also note that successful rankings and traffic from SEO seldom happen overnight. Instead, you will need to consistently work on your site to make sure that everything is working properly and being seen by search engines. Additionally, you should understand that SEO isn’t really about being ranked number one for one specific keyword. In fact, the best SEO strategies target many different keywords and focus on garnering better traffic, not just more traffic for your site. Think about it, would you rather have 1000 visitors with only 10 converting into customers or 800 visitors with 15 converting into customers. Don’t get so stuck on rankings, specific keywords, and overall traffic numbers that you lose sight of the overall results that can come from your SEO strategy.

Start with a Strategy

Establishing an SEO strategy is like planning your event. The more thought you put into who you want to attend and how you’re going to let them know about your event, the more successful you’ll be.

Optimize Your Website

Once you have a strategy in place, you’ll need to optimize your website. Doing so is like following the rules and guidelines established for having your event listed in event calendars and listings. Typically, you can’t just call the publisher of an event calendar on the day of your event and expect it to be listed. Similarly, you can’t expect SEO to launch you to the top of the search results overnight. Below, we’ve provided you with some of the most foundational ways in which you should optimize your website to yield longterm SEO results.

1. Utilize Relevant Titles and Meta Description

Your titles and meta descriptions are very important pieces of information because they show up in the search engine results. A page’s title is the heading that shows up in the search results and it is also the name that appears on the tab or window when you are on the page in a web browser. A meta description, on the other hand, is the information that shows up below the title in search results. These two short pieces of information are generally the first impression you get to make on a potential website visitor, so make them count.

2. Submit an Up-To-Date Sitemap

A sitemap is essentially a list of all of the pages on your website. An HTML sitemap is generally accessed via a link in the footer or header of your site and helps visitors find a specific page that may or may not be accessible through your other menus. An XML sitemap, on the other hand, helps Google and other search engines to better crawl and index your site. By submitting an XML sitemap, search engines are able to discover and index all of the pages on your site more easily. When the search engines are able to crawl and index new and updated pages on your website and blog, your organic search rankings tend to improve.

Type this www.YourWebsiteUrl.com/sitemap.xml in Google Search to get your site's sitemap in XML format.

How to make and upload sitemap to google.

3. Have Relevant Content on Your Pages

As we’ve already discussed, having relevant content on your pages allows your site to be relevant to searchers’ questions. On-page content needs to be written and presented so that it can be used by your site’s visitors to answer the questions they have. Search engines exist to help people find what they are looking for on the Internet. It’s your job to make sure that the information on your site’s pages is relevant to the questions your ideal customers are likely to ask. Don’t write for the search engine bots though. If your content isn’t useful to real searchers, they are unlikely to stay on your site and become customers.

4. Target Keywords That Are Relevant to Your Business

Your on-page content should include the words and phrases that you want to rank for. If you want people to find your site when they are searching for Blue Widgets, then you’d better have the words Blue Widgets on your site.

You should be aware that while ranking for general keywords can be a great goal, it may not be practical due to competition levels and varied searcher intent. Going after less competitive “long tail keywords” can actually be more productive and result in better qualified traffic coming to your site. As an example, instead of targeting just the phrase “Blue Widgets,” you may want to target a phrase like “Blue Widgets for sale in Your Town, USA.

5. Work to Gain Links from High Ranking Websites

Clear back in the dark ages of the Internet (circa 1997) Larry Page and Sergey Brin wanted to find a better way to organize the seemingly infinite amount of data available on the World Wide Web so that people could find what they were searching for. In the early days of their company — a small endeavor they named Google — they started looking at links between websites as votes approving of those websites. This groundbreaking idea would eventually become the foundation of most modern search engines.

Over nearly two decades, this idea has been refined and become more detailed and complex. Now, instead of simply counting the number of link.

What are backlinks and why are the important.