Search Marketing is the art & science of using search engines to market your product or service. We have extensive experience using both SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and SEM (Search Engine Marketing).

 

Understanding the differences between these methodologies is important to being able to understand how they can work to bring your business or product to the attention of the millions of individuals who surf the web each day. The fact is that your overall marketing plan probably should include some of both.

 

SEO – Search Engine Optimization – is the process of creating and managing your website so that it appears on the first page of Google organic (“free”) search results for the keywords that best describe your business, product or service. There are numerous elements to an effective SEO program but the basic ones are: content and intelligent site structure so that the Google search robot can easily crawl your site, find all of your pages and know what is on each of those pages so your site can be indexed. Other elements such as backlinks also can play an important role in helping you achieve a good ranking for your desired keywords. Unfortunately, SEO has become a swampland filled with hucksters and quick buck artists you will sell you a pre-packaged “system” and guarantee you a page one rank for a keyword. Avoid these scams at all costs. It takes thorough site analysis to perform proper SEO.

 

SEM – Search Engine Marketing – focuses on paid services such as Google AdWords and Microsoft AdCenter. Advertisers create ads and then bid on how much they want to pay when someone clicks on their ad in response to a keyword search. As a simple example, if you have a website that sells exotic plants you likely would create an ad that appears when someone searches on the term, “exotic plants.” You would also decide how much you are willing to pay when someone clicks on that ad and goes to your website. Like SEO, SEM is a combination of art & science and because you are paying for your keywords you have much greater control over how and where your ads or seen. But a poorly managed SEM campaign can rapidly drain through your budgets and your profits. Google AdWords (and to a lesser extent Ad Center) provide a tremendous arsenal of tools to help an advertiser cost-effectively manage a campaign but unless you know how to use these tools and analyze the data you may not get the maximum return on investment.

 

eMarketSmart can help you with both SEO and SEM programs.