Search Engine Optimization vs Search Engine Marketing

SEO vs. SEM: The Differences Between Natural & Paid Search

 The SEO vs. SEM conundrum is a balancing act for many small businesses. Understanding how these elements can benefit your marketing campaigns and what potential dangers exist is the first step toward creating a cohesive push.

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Understanding the differences between SEO, or search engine optimization, vs. SEM, or search engine marketing, is very important when determining how to distribute marketing funds and key business resources. SEO is focused on organic search results — getting to the top of the list when a user searches for keywords related to your business. SEM revolves around choosing the right keywords to invest advertising dollars in when you want to appear in the paid search results on major search engines. Combining the two into one cohesive strategy can be exceptionally beneficial for your business.
 

Potential gains from SEO and SEM When you begin contemplating SEO vs. SEM, it's important to keep your desired results in mind. Both are means toward attracting customers, and use very different tactics to do so. SEO revolves around a focus on bringing your company's sales site in line with what search engines want. Google and other major engines are concerned with delivering the top content to users, and they tend to feature sites with clear navigation and easy-to-understand benefits for searchers. SEM relies on creating quick, clear advertisements and bidding on keywords that prospective customers will likely enter into search engines. Companies that focus on SEO vs. SEM should keep in mind that the benefits of both include increased conversion and click-through rates.

Some of the Latest and Greatest Search Engine Marketing Options
Organic search and paid search options lie at the heart of the SEO vs. SEM debate. New software regularly enters the market that can help you track your spending on both on-site SEO- and SEM-related ads. In addition, many SEO tools and tricks exist that can be used by proponents of both SEO and SEM to maximize results from search engine campaigns. Keeping companies at the top of the search results and the sponsored results on major engines is the focus of all these developments.

Potential Dangers and Unforeseen Expenses
Staying on top of search engine results can be an expensive endeavor. Google and its competitors constantly update their algorithms, which are the calculations that drive the engine, and a minor change can bury your site five or ten pages further down in the listings than before. Algorithm changes often mirror user behavior, and quality SEO requires your Webmaster to stay on top of what users want in the current marketplace. Unforeseen expenses can also arise if certain keywords that regularly drive traffic to your site through sponsored results become popular. Google, Bing and similar search engines rely on a bidding strategy, with those companies that pay more for appearances and clicks getting greater exposure. Bids can go through the roof, with costs tens to hundreds of times greater if news events or other circumstances drive up search traffic on keywords your company uses.

SEO Martian
St Paul - Minneapolis
Minneapolis SEO | Minneapolis SEO Company |  Search Engine Marketing | Local SEO
612-327-5756

Find the Right SEO -SEM Vendor for You

How to Find the Right SEM SEO Vendor

 

You can have the most beautiful website ever—with the most compelling content of all time—but if your customers can't find you, it won't do you a bit of good. Successful search engine marketing (SEM) campaigns can help you attract new customers and reengage existing or former ones by improving your search ranking, but it often takes the right combination of ranking factors to generate real results.

Yes, that's SEM…not SEO. If you're confused about the difference between SEM and SEO, you're not alone. But check out our SEO website and get a complete explanation on the differences between the two.



Most small business owners aren't experts in SEM, but an experienced vendor can help craft effective small business marketing campaigns. Although SEM campaigns vary by vendor, the strategies they use fall primarily into these four categories:

1. Keyword Analysis
By determining the "best" keywords, you can improve your website's rank in search queries. Some vendors use crawlers that digest your website to determine gaps in your current keywords. Others analyze past traffic to find new keywords to target.

2. Backlink Generation
Most backlink techniques are nefarious and referred to as "black hat" SEO. Google generally doesn't like even "good" backlink techniques. However, establishing relevant links from other websites to the products or services sold on your site can help drive traffic your way. Relevant is the key word: offer content that helps or educates—content that makes people want to share your site.



SEO Martian
Best SEO Company | Minneapolis SEO | Minneapolis SEO Company | SEO Services
1-612-327-5756

SEO Martian

SEO Martian

Minneapolis SEO | Online Business Marketing

What are you trying to achieve with your online business SEO ?

Whether you sell shoes and clothes or repair cars for a living it is very important you get Visitors to your website. Hiring a professional SEO company can help but there are many things you can do for yourself to kick it into hi gear.

There are no real secrets in SEO there are many different approaches but the tried and true method of fresh content and quality keyword research have been around and will always be around.

Google has umpteen hundred matrix for their search algorhythms, you cannot even begin to  understand most of them, and for the most part you don’t need to . 

Being an active member of the online community aggressively but ethically promoting your business, can get you far ahead of your competition.

Organic search will and should always rule the roost. Personally I don’t click on those ad’s on the top and sides of search pages, and my customers stats that opt to pay for some advertising bear that out. Our organically grown search far outpaces the paid search in the most important statistic, how long is a searcher staying on the site. IE, what is the bounce rate.

Bounce rate = Bounce rate is a measure of the effectiveness of a website in encouraging visitors to continue with their visit. It is expressed as a percentage and represents the proportion of visits that end on the first page of the website that the visitor sees.

Our success with organic has that rate at around %60 vs. paid search at %90. That’s a huge difference when you are paying per click to have someone not even stay long enough for the coffee to get cold.

Give SEO Martian a call. We can discuss many options to get those visitors to your site and keep them interested!!

SEO Martian

612-327-5756

Ask for the head Martian, Mike

Minneapolis SEO | Minneapolis SEO Company | SEO Services | Search Engine Marketing

SEO Services Can be Overwhelming, Hire a Professional SEO Expert

 If you’re new to the SEO game then you’re probably overwhelmed by the abundance of information.

Simply put, SEO stands for search engine optimization, also known as organic search. 

It is the process of developing website content that is both keyword driven and appealing to leading search engines like Google. The goal of SEO is to rank higher in search engines when users search for keywords that best relate to your content.

Stay on topic. Your webpage content should be focused and to the point. If you have a webpage about SEO, only provide content about SEO. Discussing other topics will only reduce the value of your initial keyword research.

Add a meta description. Giving your page a meta description allows you to decide how Google describes your page in its results. Again, keep these descriptions short and sweet to ensure you do not exceed the maximum number of viewable characters.

Your Biggest Enemy 

It’s not your competitor, or another startup, or even Google. It’s the back button. Keeping visitors attracted to the content on your site will visit longer and be more likely to purchase your goods and services.

If you don’t have the time to learn all about SEO or if you would rather focus on your business and develoing new products, consider hiring a professional. SEO Martian specializes in SEO, as well as Search Engine Marketing, another key to bringing viewers to your webste.

SEO Martian

612-327-5756

Minneapolis SEO | SEO Marketing | SEO Services 

3 Simple SEO Tips

3 Simple SEO Tips For Small Businesses

Do you want to get your website ranked higher in google? Here are some great tips for do it yourselfer's

1. Write a page or blog post on your site that’s dedicated to each of your top keywords
This is also a good way to show your customers you know all about the product or service they’re interested in. Picture yourself explaining to a friend or relative in five minutes what you do in that specific area.
The write up doesn’t have to be more than 200 – 300 words and should list the target keywords no more than two or three times. Remember this should be as natural and easy to read as possible, but have the keywords mentioned in a way that makes sense.

2. Ensure the technical setup of your website is search engine friendly
Most platform hosted websites do this naturally already, but if you have a custom built website you need to think about your folder structure, site map, and HTML readability.
Most website designers spend lots of time making the graphics layout look visually appealing to their human audience, but you also must remember that search engines look at your site through a very technical lens.
There’s no “style points” here!  If your site is heavy on Flash, make sure there’s a text based description that lives in the HTML to help clue in the search bots. Consider removing your splash or welcome page, and instead build a homepage with descriptions and pointers to the main content areas of your site.

3. Ensure your homepage contains a text description with 2 or 3 of those top keywords
This is where we start crossing over to the artful/creative side of the process. The goal of this step is simply stated: “If you want someone to find your website by searching for these terms, where do you have them listed on your website for the search engines to find them?”
For small business sites, they typically have one main page. Make sure you add a couple sentences that naturally describe your business, and weave in your top three keywords somehow. To gauge success of these keywords, keep an eye on your site ranking to see if there is movement.

Are your SEO efforts bringing in happy visitors?

Your SEO efforts should be bringing more happy visitors to your website

Anyone with online business interests, especially small to medium enterprises, will likely be aware that Google is continually updating their SEO algorithms to improve the quality of their search results.

SEO, as a result, has become a bit of a dirty word with many webmasters shying away from it entirely for fear of being slapped with a penalty and losing valuable organic traffic. But that doesn't have to be the case.
Entrepreneurs can still create a high-quality user experience on their site using ethical SEO strategies, while avoiding practices that may end up doing more harm than good.

In SEO terms, the happier people are with your site, the more likely it is that Google will give your page rankings a boost, and the more traffic you'll get.

There are a number of algorithmic updates tasked with measuring the user experience directly. A good example is the page layout algorithm that penalizes sites with too many ads above the fold.
It makes sense to enforce a limit on the amount of advertising that can be crammed into the top of a page because otherwise visitors end up having to search for the content they want, which can be infuriating.

Many businesses are not reaching their full potential because of unnecessary technical issues that they may not even be aware of -- even if Google is.
Even seemingly small technical issues can lead to large losses in traffic. Many smaller sites tend to have bad performance, leading to slow server response times and page load times. In addition, many business owners don't have sufficient technical understanding to ensure that their sites return the correct server response codes.

Make sure you understand your web platform and that Google is crawling and indexing it correctly.
Generate only original, quality content. It is far better to have one great article that gets to the top of the search results in its particular niche than to waste time generating tens or hundreds of mediocre articles.


 SEO Martian
Minneapolis SEO | Minneapolis SEO Company | SEO Services | Search Engine Marketing

1-888-861-6330