At Upton Technology Group, our clients come to us with many different levels of search engine optimization knowledge. Some have heard of search engine marketing and know that it’s a great way to promote a business online, but don’t really know what it is. Others have scarcely even heard the words. Wherever you fall on that spectrum, this guide will help you understand search engine optimization so you can know how it might benefit your business in the longer term.
Search Engine Marketing Is What Makes The Sale
Search engine marketing is unique because it isn’t really about selling your company to people who aren’t yet convinced they want to buy. It is not push marketing at all. Instead, it’s all about selling your particular product to someone who is already looking for the general type of thing you offer. For example, if someone is looking to buy a refrigerator, search engine optimization can help guide them to your particular refrigerator supply business by ensuring that your company shows up on the top or near the top of search engine results.
Search engine optimization can help you connect with a new customer base, but the results will be mixed at best unless you really have something to offer that demographic. For instance, the hypothetical refrigerator company mentioned above could target people looking for freezers, and it could rank highly for those terms – the benefit would just be debatable if it didn’t actually sell freezers.
Search Engine Optimization: The Art Of Connecting Your Business With People Who Want To Become Customers
Search engine optimization is simply the art and science of getting your website to rank highly in search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and Bing for certain targeted terms that you select. Search engine marketing is what goes beyond that, and includes a number of more difficult marketing techniques. Search engine marketing uses your high rank from search engine optimization to communicate with potential customers about the benefits of using your product over your competitor’s.
Search engine marketing has many different aspects, all of which need to work together for the best results. Content marketing is one of the most important aspects of search engine marketing, and ties in with search engine optimization as well. Content marketing includes all of the text on your website, but also all the text in articles that you publish on the internet. Search engine optimization ties in with your text because the keywords in that text are a major part of the overall search engine ranking that your webpage will get. For that reason, good content is a cornerstone of successful search engine optimization; because reading that content will ultimately be what makes customers choose to buy your product.
SEO & SEM Work Together
Although search engine optimization and search engine marketing are distinct, they are absolutely inseparable. You can’t have one without the other. Without strong placement in the search engines, the best web copy won’t be seen by people who intend to buy. Without strong sales-oriented copy, a good ranking in the search engines won’t lead to sales. Understanding the difference between them is important, but it’s even more important to understand how they work together.