How are SEO and SEM Complementary?
So both SEO and SEM rely primarily on keyword targeting to drive traffic and increase conversions. Understanding what people are searching for and delivering the best possible organic content and paid ads is vital to both SEO and SEM.
The majority of shoppers online do a lot of investigating and searching before they choose a product or service, so having a strong presence using both SEO and SEM is critical to increasing your brand’s visibility in the long run.
Having the strongest search presence is critical since most people search diligently online before making final purchase on anything.
SEO and SEM are complementary in the sense that an SEO-friendly website is going to convert more leads generated by SEM. Essentially that makes SEO integral to improving your SEM, making the two strategies inseparable.
Improving conversion rates comes down to optimizing the sales funnels on your site. Setup your site flow properly, and conversion rates will go through the roof. By generating high-quality traffic with SEO first, and optimizing your entire website, you can target the right keywords and increase sales drastically.
If you need a brand new website, we can prioritize PPC campaigns to generate sales while your SEO rankings take effect over time.
Differences Between SEO and SEM?
While the primary goal of both SEM & SEO is to increase your brand’s visibility within the search engines, SEO is focused entirely on optimizing your website through on-site and off-site efforts. SEM involves additional advertising methods like Google PPC advertising.
What is Search Engine Optimization? (SEO)
Essentially SEO is all about generating organic traffic for your site. The best part about SEO? It’s virtually free, after all the laboring and maintenance costs, of course. Put it this way, as your rankings increase, you don’t pay more money to Google or something, and as you grow your organic traffic, it tends to snowball a bit, leading to even more sales and traffic. More site visitors means more awareness of your business, and ultimately more conversions and sales.
SEO is necessary to beat out the competition, and it’s especially crucial if you want web site crawlers to understand your site wholly. If you want the highest chance of ranking number one on the search engine results page (SERPs), then you need an SEO strategy crafted by experts.
SEO is not one size fits all. What may work for one niche definitely won’t apply blindly to yours. Our SEO team has decades of search engine optimization experience to help you rank number one for those critical keywords.
If you’re serious about implementing a digital marketing strategy, then you can’t skip SEO. Search engine optimization is a vital part of a successful digital marketing campaign. For affordable SEO services that get results, GetFound is unmatched.
How SEO Works
Search engines look for a magnitude of different elements when accessing your site like keywords, link text, meta tags, etc. Crawlers then rank your website according to its ability to attract organic traffic and satisfy the needs of searchers.
Specifically, crawlers are looking for:
- Quality Content: High-quality, provocative content sends a clear message to search engines and users alike, it means you’re providing considerable value to searchers, and Google loves that. Link building is a massive part of developing quality content because it lets crawlers know other sites trust you and vouch for your content.
- User Experience: Your entire website should be designed for users to have a painless, fast, and comfortable experience browsing your products and services. Is your site clear, concise, and easy to navigate? If you’re able to help users reach their end goals without a hitch in the process, you’ll see sales and conversions soar to new heights.
- Link Management: Is your content full of internal links to other content on your site? Are you citing authority sites and creating links outbound links in your content? These are the basic requirements of any SEO strategy, and if you can learn to do it well, it can accelerate your SEO higher than ever. Following popular online resources is not enough to experience to implement and handle an entire SEO strategy yourself. Eventually, an SEO expert is required if you’re serious about increasing traffic and sales for your business.
Keep in mind that Google doesn’t reward your site immediately after you make changes. It takes time for SEO to take effect. Typically if your site has been around a while, you can see significant progress as quickly as 90 days. If your site is brand new, you can expect at least 4 – 6 months before any considerable traffic comes your way. Of course, this depends on the niche of your business, and the fierceness of competitors in your space.
What is SEM?
SEM is just paid search advertising instead of organic search advertising. You’ll usually see SEM-based efforts at the top of Google. The skill of knowing what keywords to target, and where to spend your money, requires an expert’s strategy and specialized knowledge acquired from running hundreds of SEM campaigns.
SEM-based advertising activities include:
- Paid ad campaigns (highly targeted)
- Writing sales copy with highly selective keywords
- Using an allotted keyword budget as effectively as possible
- Using key metric performance data like CTR (click-through rate) and CPC (cost-per-click) to determine the best use of the marketing budget
When done incorrectly, SEM can be a total waste of money, and not have the intended result of getting your business to the top of the rankings. Ensuring you have skilled SEM professionals, your ads are well designed, and your sales copy is on point are all necessary to achieve optimal SEM performance.
As far as helping brand recognition, SEM is an excellent advertising strategy for this endeavor. Since you’ll be at the top of the search list every time someone is looking for your keywords, it’s great for building awareness and also bringing in targeted traffic to your business site.
Since SEM requires payments to target keywords, it’s easy to see your ROI. Our digital marketers can monitor incoming traffic and create and optimize new campaigns based on data.