SEO Explained

SEO & SEM

Both SEO and SEM are effective ways to bring visitors and customers to your website, and are pivotal to your success online. We cannot stress enough the fact that just having a nice website online is NOT ENOUGH to be successful and earn money.  We are experts in both SEO and SEM, and want you to understand what these terms mean, and how your business can benefit by adopting either or both methods of promotion.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation, whilst SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing. So what’s the difference?

Here’s an easy way to remember………

seO – O for Organic (organic listings in the search engines which are listed free of charge)

seM – M for Money (paid listings in the search engines which cost a fee each time the ad is clicked)

SEO is a long term strategy for obtaining hits to your website, there are a number of factors to consider such as on-page optimisation, the rules of the search engines and current trends which affect placement on Google, Yahoo and Bing.

Many experts consider organic search engine results to be superior to paid results, as the viewer perceives they are not being “sold” by advertising. The average viewer will click on the website returned results on page 1 of their search page, not many will click through more than about 2 to 3 pages, so it is vital to be ranked on the first page of the search engines.

Market share for the top 3 search engines is Google 72%, Yahoo 15% and Bing/MSN 9%. So we can deduct from this that concentrating on results in Google will bring the most business to your website. This being said, it is also the most competitive search engine to rank in, and requires much time and effort to see some page 1 results, depending on the keyword being targeted. The rules for being listed and ranked well on Google are freely available on their website for developers, and covers everything from how to code pages and images properly to what is considered best practise for linking and social media.

We are experts at SEO and keep up to date with all the search engines’ rules and suggestions for obtaining the best results. We never do anything “shady” (black hat) which could compromise your listing. Every facet of our SEO work is done by hand, not an automated computer program. We perform “on-page” work on your website, ensuring every detail is 100% compliant with the current rules and best practise before we go ahead and perform “off-page” work which includes obtaining links from authority websites, using the latest social media techniques for promotion and utilising methods which we know work from experience. We can’t say exactly what we do as this would give away our secrets! But suffice to say the plan of action we put into place is comprehensive and effective.

SEM is an instant strategy for obtaining hits to your website, and comes in the form of ads placed within the search results, competing with any organic results returned for the search term used.

Particularly with a brand new website, SEM can be an effective way of driving traffic and highly targeted visitors to your website. Each time a user clicks on your ad, you are charged a fee by the search engine company, known as PPC (Pay Per Click). Google Ad-words is the best known PPC advertising program today, and the cost per click will vary greatly depending on the keywords you want to target, the shorter and more popular, the more each click will cost. You can set a budget to spend per click, per day and per month so the expense does not spiral out of control, the position you appear in the paid results section of the search engine page will depend also on how much you are prepared to pay per click.

One new trend to consider is the Facebook ads program, we have run several campaigns (for this website actually) and have gotten some good results, for an amazingly cheap investment compared to a Google Ad-words campaign.

SEM can bring good instant returns, but must be managed properly to contain costs, it can become very expensive very quickly if you are not careful. We have experience in running both small and large budget campaigns, targeting the right keywords and using slogans and ad content to draw in highly targeted visitors.

So what do we suggest?

A combination of both SEO and SEM, with an emphasis on long term SEO to bring in free traffic. A SEM campaign can run for as long as you want, whether it be 1 week or 1 year, whilst you need to commit at least 6 months to a SEO campaign, we recommend 12 months for the best rankings. When you sit down to budget out your website for the year or future years, our advice is to incorporate SEO and some SEM as a key component, in fact we recommend spending 70% of your total website budget on promotion, as this is what will bring you in customers and business.