Search Engine Marketing and Optimization (SEM/SEO)

What are SEM and SEO? What is the difference?

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is the purchase of Google AdWords, online media banner ads and other forms of paid search engine advertising. It is a targeted form of online advertising where you can market to people who type in specific words or phrases into a specific search engine. For example, lets say you are selling a leather restoration product, you can advertise to people who search “Leather repair” in Google. You get to decide what your daily marketing budget is, what keywords you want to market to, and to what destination you want the advertisement to drive web traffic to–and much more.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of organically improving the prominence of a website in search results pulled from search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Each search engine has a system of “crawlers” who scan and analyze your website’s content, links, and layout to make sure you are providing valuable, relevant, and easy to access content to web surfers.

They key difference between Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing is that with SEM, you pay to show up when people use search engines; and with SEO, you build your search engine presence organically. (It’s much more complex than that, but that’s the skinny.)

When both SEO and SEM are done correctly, your brand is much more visible to the eyes that count. SEO and SEM are a constant work in progress, it’s not something that you can set and forget about.

How does this SEO/SEM stuff benefit my business?

It’s estimated that over 3 billion searches are done every single day on search engines. Search engines were designed to help people find information, find answers, and find solutions. Every business has been designed to solve one problem or another. The way your business can benefit from search engine campaigns by strategically placing your business in front of people searching for information, products, or services relevant to your business or industry.

SEO and SEM are the necessary components to your online marketing campaign that will bring more traffic to your website, blog, or squeeze page. Improved rankings are a product of consistent content & website optimization, the use of solid keywords, and linking other webpages back to your website. The benefit to your business consists of new subscribers, comments, sales, referrals, retention and much more.

How much does a quality SEO/SEM campaign cost?

SEM depends much on the keywords you are wanting to compete for. If a lot of people are fighting for a specific keyword (ex: Green apples), or a specific keyword phrase (ex: Great desert recipes with apples), then it will take more time and more of an investment to rank higher in the search engines. Typically the longer key word phrases are less expensive. The great thing about SEO/SEM is that you get to decide how much you are able to invest each day on your ads.

We have several different Search Engine Optimization packages to assist you with tasks like monetizing the content on your website through affiliate links, optimizing your site to be SEO-friendly, or helping you generate links back to your website on other relevant websites and blogs. At the end of the day, we can create an effective strategy to increase your ranking on search. Basic SEO packages start at $150/mo.

Our basic packages for managing Search Engine Marketing campaigns start at $400/mo. and go up depending on several variables within the campaign we create with you.

How would you like to get higher on Google, Yahoo or Bing today?