Search engine marketing (SEM) and social media are at the heart of digital marketing. Both are great tools in which to generate valuable leads for your business online. However, search marketing and social media take different approaches and therefore, require different expertise to deliver them effectively and the fundamental way in how they engage with a target audience.
Search Engine Marketing
What is ‘search marketing’? We are really talking about search engine optimization (SEO) and Google Adwords (PPC). These are the two ways in which a company can get themselves in front of potential customers based on what they search for on Google, but they work in different ways. Search Engine Optimization is the process of doing what is necessary, both on your web pages and elsewhere, to get your website visible on the first page of search results when somebody types in a search phrase, and ideally at the top of those page one results. It does not follow, however, that the more you spend on SEO, the better results you will have. Like most other areas of products and services, you need to do your research to be sure you will actually get what is being offered.
With rare exception, SEO has a much higher ROI than PPC. It has been shown time and again, for example, that the amount of time a visitor spends on your site as a result of an organic search result click is substantially longer than the time they spend on your site from clicking on a PPC ad. The reasons are various, and we will devote some time to that in subsequent posts, so stay tuned. You are probably asking yourself, if SEO happens ‘organically’ and it’s free, then what am I paying for? Well, this leads us back to the very fundamentals of SEO. Google ranks search results based on relevance to the enquiry or search made. But the term ‘relevance’ is a completely subjective term. If someone searches for “social media agency”, are they looking for help managing social media presence for their or are they really looking for a job in the digital marketing field? Due to the dynamic and complexity nature of Google, hiring an expert to manage your search engine optimization is where a bulk of your monetary cost will be.