Visibility is Everything

In the world of business, visibility is everything. Whether you’re an established business or just getting going, understanding the intricacies of digital marketing can spell the difference between success and obscurity. At the heart of this digital maze lie two formidable strategies: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM). While they might sound the same, both SEO and SEM are unique and important for the journey to digital marketing success. 

Organic Growth with SEO

The process of SEO involves nurturing your website to attain organic exposure in search engines. These processes and activities should be done, repeatedly, month in and month out, on your website. One of the great things about SEO activities is that once the work is done, it will continue reaping benefits for a long time. A huge focus in SEO is content creation. This could be done in landing page and blog page creation that focuses on a particular keyword. Once that page ranks for the given keyword, all you would need to do is add new content to the page periodically and it will maintain it’s ranking. If another business start to rank for that keyword, you can keep adding more content, and better content, to your page to help keep it in that number one spot. 

While there are countless activities and tasks to be performed in SEO, a few of the most common and powerful are:

1. Keyword Optimization

Keywords navigate users to your digital doorstep. These keywords are the words or phrases that users type into Google and leading search engines, hoping to find businesses such as yours. Strategic placement of relevant keywords within your website content is the cornerstone of SEO.

2. Crafting High-Quality Content

Content reigns supreme in the world of SEO. Compelling, informative, and valuable content not only captivates users but also earns the coveted seal of approval from search engine algorithms. Refining and improving content, and adding more and more content is always a huge goal of any SEO campaign. 

3. Technical SEO00000

Beyond captivating content, the technical infrastructure of your website plays a pivotal role. Optimizing website speed, enhancing user experience, and ensuring mobile-friendliness are crucial for SEO success. You can perform SEO on any website using any Content Management System (CMS), but our favorite CMS to work with at Full Scope Creative is WordPress. WordPress offers a great CMS that is geared towards and ready for SEO success, and there is an endless variety of plugins (such as Yoast) available to help take site SEO to the next level.

4. Building Bridges with Backlinks

Backlinks from authoritative websites strengthen your website’s credibility in the eyes of search engines, elevating its ranking. Having links from well known and reputable websites is arguably the most impactful way to bring your site to the top of search results. But not just any website link will do, it needs to be a link from a highly reputable website. A link for a respected industry based website is a great backlink to have for your site. A link from an unknown website, or worse yet a known spam website, can have a negative impact on your website’s rankings. 

Paid Promotion and SEM

While SEO focuses on organic growth in search rankings, SEM looks to the strength of paid advertising to boost your online presence to new heights. While SEO is more of a long term strategy and can be effective as long as the content is published and reviewed, SEM is going to bring results while the ads run. That might sound like a deterrent, but the benefit of SEM is that the effects can be seen very quickly. While SEO might take months or longer to see a top ranking, SEM activities can start pulling in significant leads right away (depending on budgets and keywords). 

There are again countless activities and options available for SEM, and a few of the most useful and effective are:

1. Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising

A PPC campaign allows a website owner or advertiser the chance to bid on keywords relevant to the business, thus gaining a top placement of their ads in search engine results. One of the great things about PPC is that you only pay when users click on your ads, making it a very cost-effective and measurable (and repeatable) strategy.

2. Display Advertising

Beyond text-based ads, SEM encompasses display advertising, which showcases visually engaging ads on websites within a network, captivating users’ attention and driving conversions.

PPC ads are not the only advertising options available in SEM. Display ads, which can showcase well put together and engaging visual ads on websites within a network, can provide another source of conversions. These ads could be place in the Google network (google.com and youtube.com) or the Facebook network (facebook.com, instagram.com, etc), or any other ad based network

3. Remarketing

People often say “I was just thinking about Widget XYZ the other day, and now all I see is ads for them!” That process is called remarketing. Odds are, that person more than thought of Widget XYZ, but rather they also searched on Google or liked a post on social media or watched a video or ad about it. Once the user has in any way engaged with the product, remarketing makes it possible to continue showing ads for that product or company. 

4. Shopping Ads

For e-commerce businesses, shopping ads are a game-changer. These ads showcase product images, prices, and other details directly within search results, streamlining the purchasing process for users.

Integrating SEO and SEM

SEO and SEM operate on similar but different principles. When put together, they can create a synergy that can yield amazing marketing results for a small business. By using both SEO and SEM, a business can reach new levels of visibility, gain great marketing insights, and maximize their reach and profit. Using SEO and SEM and creating a marketing harmony to build a lasting online presence.