SEM is a marketing strategy where a business person optimizes and advertises their website to appear more in search results. It is important to note that clients should never use the terms SEO and SEM interchangeably. Although they work hand-in-hand, they are not the same word. SEO is indispensable for creating online exposure for your brand and strengthening your company’s position in the competition.
The future of successful marketing on the Internet is hinged directly on the strategy you use to increase your bid to get your website to the first page of search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
- 35% SEO visibility occurs when you rank # 1 for your keyword. Here, 35% represents the amount of clicks you usually get when ranking # 1 for a search term.
- On the other hand, “if you rank, say, # 10, your SEO visibility is at 2%.
Paid advertising enables you to buy ad space in search engine result pages (SERPs), promising faster results than SEOs have in the long run.
Difference Between SEM and SEO?
SEO is a technique to optimize your website content and pages to generate more traffic from search engines. SEM goes beyond this to include paid search ads.
Both SEM and SEO should be part of your digital marketing strategy to improve your online visibility, as both have their strengths. Search engine optimization helps establish your online reputation in the long term, so you will attract consistent traffic with evergreen content that connects to people at the top funnel.
SEM enables you to achieve cost-effective results by driving conversions at the bottom of the funnel quickly. SEO is a powerful tool to optimize your content. SEO and SEM combined, however, will create even more robust content campaigns. It is the process of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results. You need to pay attention to the quality of your traffic.
SEM vs. SEO
It is crucial to compare SEM with SEO to understand how you can use each practice for your website and content. Search engine marketing describes paid search marketing, in which businesses pay search engines like Google in exchange to show their ads in search results.
However, SEO is different because it is not about paid search marketing. Instead, SEO is achieved through organic traffic, and businesses have to earn their place on search engine result pages by targeting their content towards a specific keyword search.
But both SEO and SEM are integral to the development of your online marketing strategy. SEO is ideal for long-term growth, and PPC or pay-per-click is best for businesses that want to see quick results.
How to Improve your Online Visibility With SEM
1. Define the Goals of your Strategy
You should always think about what you need to achieve with a particular campaign. Set realistic goals that will help you to outline your strategy for creating ads.
Do you want to increase brand awareness, sales, revenue, or promote new collection/offerings? Whatever your goal, you can use the acronym SMART to create your vision. Goals must be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-limited.
Your SEM strategy does not require multiple objectives. In fact, the less and the more specific, the better. Write down your objectives, assess how you will achieve them, and what metrics you will use to measure their reach.
Once your campaign is activated, you can use these metrics to assess the effectiveness of your advertising and make changes accordingly.
2. Excluding Irrelevant Searches
Once your campaign is activated, you can exclude some irrelevant keywords from your campaign to ensure that your campaign targets the right audience.
Since search engines use an infinite variety of keywords, some may not be relevant to your business and may negatively affect your campaign and add unnecessary costs.
Google defines negative keywords as follows “words that allow you to prohibit search terms from your campaigns and help focus only on keywords that are relevant to your customers.”
Therefore, you can exclude some irrelevant keywords that lead to low-quality traffic and wasteful campaign expenditure. You can also search for new keywords that are relevant and add them to the campaign to increase your reach.
3. Use Ad Extensions
Add supportive extensions (or plugins) and text to include additional information to increase the effectiveness of the ad and give users more reasons to click your ad.
Showing extensions will give your ad more visibility and more value than the ad, as it will personalize the information of each search.
Google ads will choose which extensions are included based on what a person has searched for. Google will also value the use of these extensions to complement the ads. Therefore, you should include all extensions that are relevant to your business.
There are many different extensions, including business location, phone number (or click to click), price, reviews, links to webpages, message options, and social information.
Google ad extensions are free to use, so any click on the extension will be charged as a regular ad click.
4. Use Ad Groups in your Campaigns
Within your campaign, you can easily create different ad groups that can link to different landing pages. If you are promoting many different items, you can create a more tailored experience with ad groups. Each specific item must have a separate ad group. Using different ad groups will help you target specific audiences who are more likely to click on your ad.
How to Improve your Online Visibility Through SEO
1. Each Page must be Relevant
It is one of the essential aspects of SEO. Each page of your website should address the general topic of your business – a single topic. If your business is painting, every page should include the same.
Why does it need to be on every page? A search engine crawler will periodically crawl your website in search of a common topic. When each page is related to this topic, search engines can be more sure that a user will find relevant content there based on their search terms.
2. Meta description is Crucial
A meta description appears below the title in the search engine result pages, and one can discover a clear idea of what the person will find on that particular page.
To get the best results, it is important to maximize this space. Make sure your meta title and description are clear and relevant and that your description is less than 170 characters, including spaces. When it is finished, it appears that all will be an ellipse.
3. Use Keywords in the Image ALT Text
The ALT text for your image is not just what appears when a mouse hovers over the image, it also helps search engines read what they have in the image.
4. Add Links to Keywords in your Content
It is crucial for SEO to include links to other pages (both within your website and to external websites). With links come anchor text (the text that the link is inserted onto), which is also essential to optimize.
What does the anchor text consist of? “Click here!”. Such promotional type of text does not attract the reader. Avoid such anchor texts. Good anchor text contains words relevant to the page they ideally link to and – yah! You guessed it: keywords.
5. Create Quality Content Regularly
It is also important to keep up to date with SEO core updates. Guidelines and best practices are constantly changing, so what you learned about SEO two years ago has likely changed considerably. So you have to keep learning. Re-post content regularly to keep your audience engaged with your brand.
Which is better: SEM or SEO?
When you decide which strategy is right for your brand as well as your marketing strategies, you should consider the following:
Industry
If you do business for a long time and already know the requirements of your customers that provide valuable results, you can start a long-term SEO strategy. You can start an SEM campaign when you don’t know about your competitors and customers. Therefore, test your products, services, and ideas.
Competition
You need to know about your competitors, what they are doing and how they perform in search marketing. It helps you understand how to deal with them. Research on which words or keywords they use to drive traffic systematically. Know about where you can improve both organic (SEO) and paid (SEM) search.
Conclusion
Overall, search engine marketing and SEO have many benefits for businesses. Using the strategies we have listed, you can increase brand awareness and click-through rates on more channels by investing in organic and paid search. If you want more information about PPC or SEO marketing, contact us. Our SEO experts will give you a free consultation regarding the same. Call now!