As part of our series covering the commonly used abbreviations in Digital Marketing, we are going to take a look into how Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) work hand-in-hand within the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) to produce online visibility of your products and services.
There are two different ways to be found online – organically and through paid advertising. Let’s take a look at each method a little more in-depth.
Organic Results and SEO
Organically means that a user opens up their search engine, enters a search query, and your site populates as one of the results. This happens because the search engine has determined that your website is relevant to the query, and, in addition, a reliable website. Search Engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing want you to continue to come back and use them, so the results must be relevant and reliable so that you have a good experience. Returning irrelevant results, or even worse, results from unreliable sources, does not encourage the user to return to use your search engine.
So, how do search engines like Google determine that you are both relevant and reliable? It can be broken down into a relatively simple explanation, but the process is quite complex! In short, Google has developed automatic algorithms that rank your site. They send out what are called “spiders” to “crawl” your site and check it for relevancy and reliability. These spiders crawl the web (spiders…web…get it?) looking for sites. It caches those sites, or essentially takes a screenshot of them. When a user enters a query, Google is actually searching its cached pages, not the live website, to produce the results. Your site is ranked according to this algorithm, which in turn determines where your page shows up in the results. The more relevant and reliable your site is, the higher you’ll rank in the results.
In order to help your rankings in search engines, organically, you can do what is called Search Engine Optimization. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process by which webpages are brought to the top of Search Engine Results Pages (SERP), generating organic visibility from a search query. As mentioned before, Google crawls and caches sites, and uses those and a very complex algorithm to produce search results. We could spend another two weeks discussing all that goes into that “formula” but to keep it simple: the more you update content possibly via blogs, utilize backlinks, strengthen your social media platforms, use relevant keywords in your copy, and ensure you have a solid backbone to your website, the greater chances you have to move up in the rankings.
Paid Advertising/SEM
Another way to be found within search results is to place paid advertisements within the search engine results. Advertisers bid on keywords that reflect their goods and services, which gives them the chance to be included alongside the organic search results. These ads, referred to as pay-per-click ads, are a great way to capture the user’s attention in a moment when they are seeking to make a purchase. These ads can appear as text only at the top of a SERP, like this:
Another way the ads might appear is as an image, or shopper ad, like this:
These ads are called pay-per-click because you are only charged when someone clicks on the ad, and you determine where to cap your total ad budget. This makes it a budget-friendly way to reach interested users. These types of ads can be used as a Search Engine Marketing (SEM) tool. The opportunities for paid online ads don’t stop there, though! You could do your next Auto Loan Campaign with AdWords, inline advertisements on Social Media platforms, Bing Ads, boosting a Facebook post, YouTube ads, through remarketing… the list goes on! SEM is just one way to stand out from the rest, as you can see!
Next time, we’ll discuss a little more about how a well-designed CTA can increase your CTR in the SERP to produce a greater ROI. If you missed the first post that discussed some of these basic definitions, be sure to read it here.