Visible SEM
Visible SEM with SEO Support
In the world of digital marketing, you often hear SEO and SEM in the same sentence, and you might have even been confused whether they are one and the same. But simply put, SEO and SEM are just two sides of the same coin. In this article, we will review how they share similarities, differences and how staying visible in SEM can complement your SEO efforts to appear to your target audience.
Even though both SEO and SEM are different digital marketing activities you can engage in, they do share one very important objective that will be key to you driving sales.Staying visible in SEM and SEO with the use of keywords helps to drive traffic to your website. When people search for products or services on a search engine, if you engage in both activities your business is likely to stay visible through SEM and SEO to your target market.
Focusing on their differences, SEO can help drive website traffic in the long term while taking months to show effect, where staying visible in SEM helps achieve short term marketing goals much faster. It can usually take up to a few months before you see the fruits of your SEO labour where a good SEM campaign can easily start bringing in website visibility in as little as a month.
However, the main difference here would be the cost. Though SEO, being a more passive form of digital marketing is essentially free, it requires a lot of time and human resources. Thus it is usually recommended that you outsource SEO if your team might not have the required resources. While SEM does require a certain level of investment and commitment depending on your short-term goals and how quickly you would like to achieve them.
Using both SEO and SEM together helps you to understand your target market better and how they search for products and services on the website which in turn helps you continuously improve your efforts to stay visible in SEM and SEO efforts. SEM can help you rank quickly for very competitive SEO keywords, but this should be used as a short-term plan if you want to remain cost effective. Some other ways you can help your chances of staying visible in SEM campaigns are:
Creating specific landing pages
By creating landing pages, you create an opportunity for your target market to be funneled through visual messages or conversion process like downloading an e-book or a brochure or watching a video. This increases your chances of being seen and remembered by customers.
Keyword Research
Keyword research boosts your chances of staying visible in SEM campaigns by studying how your market searches for products and services. And it is through this research and specific marketing strategies that you pick keywords your target marketing is highly likely to search for. Thus, boosting your chances of appearing to your audience.
Quality Score of Landing Pages
Just having a visually pleasing landing page is not enough, as the Google algorithm grows more advanced in its quest to help searchers find the most relevant information, they have learnt to score landing pages based on its relevance to the keywords. Thus, it is important that you ensure information on your landing pages are relevant and contain enough keywords so that Google will give you a higher quality score.
With so many variables to take note of just to stay visible in your SEM campaigns, you might sometimes feel a little overwhelmed or intimidated. Similarly with SEO, the amount of work involved to bring your website up to the top 3 pages even, require a lot of time and effort from your marketing team. If you are uncertain of your existing digital marketing strategy and cannot decide which to focus on first, or feel that you require assistance executing your SEO or SEM campaigns, feel free to contact us here and a consultant will assist you in assessing your needs with a free study of your existing digital marketing plans!