SEO & SEM to the rescue!

Imagine. You are looking for a company for which you know the name but do not know their website. On the search engine’s box you type the company’s name and in return get over 100 results but none match your search. You then try again with different wording that relate to the company and still nothing comes up. You begin to get frustrated with the search and decide not to continue. You may even choose the first result and go with that. This scenario is an organization’s and businesses, or any brand marketing itself, worst nightmare. Luckily we have search engine optimization and search engine marketing to try and limit the times this happens. Search engine optimization is the process of increasing the amount of people viewing a website by making sure that the site appears as high as it can on a search engine’s results. This is possible through the use of keywords, which is the reason why some people call it organic. These keywords are embedded in the content that the company’s writers use on their websites. Thus, the search engines look for and gather this information and in return provide their results for given keywords. Therefore, if a company wants to be high on the search engine’s results, they must be careful in understanding what their target audience type when searching their company or services.  It is best to use analytics and find the top 3 words individuals use to find your company and use those as keywords for your website.

            As mentioned above, there is also search engine marketing which is paid search or Adwords. This usually takes the form in pay-per-click or banner ads, which is the advertising side of things. However, this also takes the form of search engine optimization. SEM has methods and metrics used to optimize the websites and they are keyword research and analysis, website saturation and popularity, back end tools, and whois tools. The difference between SEO and SEM is that SEO is organic or earned whereas SEM is paid for. This can be a bit confusing to those who are new to the marketing industry. But as digital becomes a more meaningful channel for companies, practices like search engine optimization and search engine marketing are a must-do for all competitors. A great way to start, if the person in charge of the website does not know anything about search engine optimization, is by understanding all of the components that go into search engine optimization.  Google has provided a great Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide available to anyone who may need it. It includes SEO basics, improving site structure, optimizing content, dealing with crawlers, SEO for mobile phones, and promotions and analysis. Here is a quick way to understand pay-per-click . 

            Both SEO and SEM work together to get the best rank a company can have on search engine results. The most important part of all is knowing what the audience is typing into these search engines when looking for the organization, business, or service and using those keywords in the websites content or in ads.