If you’ve ever dipped your toe into any part of your website development, you might be familiar with the terms SEM and SEO – but have you ever taken the time to unpack what they actually mean?
SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing and is the practice of using paid advertisements to market your business in a search engine. The clue is really in the name! 😉
Google Ads is a perfect example of SEM, but you can market on Bing and other search platforms too. When SEM was first introduced they were simple text ads that you paid to appear above the search listings for your desired keywords, but these days they’ve evolved into all kinds of formats, from product listings that link directly to your website, relevant imagery, or even potentially video. Google will also find relevant extracts of your website to advertise when it feels the user would be interested in a particular page or section and show that too them too!
With Search Engine Marketing, you usually pay-per-click. The more businesses trying to target the same keyword, the more you’re likely going to have to pay for that click. You’ll find that most keywords have other businesses bidding on them, because Search Engine Marketing is one of the only ways you can advertise to an already motivated potential customer, making it really important that your business starts utilising this medium.
SEO is Search Engine Optimisation, and it works a little differently from SEM. This is where you optimise your website to be relevant to particular search terms, telling the search engine, such as Google, that you should be one of the search results. Google wants to deliver the most relevant result to the user so the better your content, the more Google (or any other search engine) will want to share it. It doesn’t cost you any money to get better SEO results – although, sadly, an SEO professional isn’t going to work on your website for free – and is entirely based off the content of your website.
However, Search Engines aren’t just looking for relevant keywords, they’re looking for relevant technical aspects of your website too. This is why it can be handy to get someone to help you optimise your website – to get to a #1 organic ranking for the keyword that suits your business best, you’re going to start hearing words like metadata, h1 tag, backlinks, and much more. The top organic rankings for a sought after keyword is a very competitive market, and in many cases you will struggle to break into the top rankings without some professional help, or a fair amount of time invested in research if you choose to do it yourself.
If you need help with Search Engine Marketing or Search Engine Optimisation, get in touch with us here at ADhesive Communication – we loving doing this and we’re exceedingly good at both (if we do say so ourselves). Give us a call on 4000 4724.
