Live from Madison Square Garden, SEO vs SEM!

[eko06]

A great evening in Manhattan, a fantastic atmosphere in Madison Square Garden. Web business people is waiting this match for a long time. One side there is Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing on the other, both seems fit and there is desire to win on face. Last years both sides challenged to other but they never came to face to face. Before the match starts, lets take a short look to their career, strength and weaknesses.

Called SEO is short term of Search Engine Optimization. A milestone in web business since the search engines are the main source for web users before they buy service or product online. Finest and most trustable data source with their high indexing capacity and different logical algos working on the back round may depend on your rankings while results are listed. As most web users do not look much after the 3rd pages of results, web business owners are directly influenced. A web surfer can be your client if your web site is ranked at the top of search results but how you get listed at the top of a major engine? Even there are different algos powering the search engines the main theory is mostly same, simple algo stands on location and frequency. A crawl base search engines use spiders a web site and classifies with different principles to define the ranking. A fact about algo can be changed or improved for search quality. I’am sure all professionals will remember Florida Update on Google. Indeed it was an earthquake more than an update, many results were changed or disappeared on Google, some high rankings even lost from the index. Actually general Google algo is formulated as Relevance Score , PageRank , Local Score with other tweaking , tuning or filtering aspects. Main development point of a search algo is how much off page factors are important and their degrees take part in your algo. The theory on here is not giving much control to webmasters with on page factors .Other search engines do not use Page Rank since Page Rank is a trademark which belongs to Google. Avoiding any spamming , manipulation trials, over optimization or even cloaked content, engines are modifying or changing the degrees ,adding new variables on their algo time to time but all work done is to provide higher search relevancy and quality for users. (Relevance score is SEO efforts, Page Rank is Link building efforts for Google and Local Score is links from expert documents) As seen from the formula, SEO efforts only work on relevance score and vary your ranking 10% if you hired a SEO professional but this can increase 18% if your SEO is master level. I would like to talk about Yahoo and Live search engines’ secrets either but as mentioned they are my professional secrets for now, if you don't know these, its impossible to get top results on Yahoo or Live.
Search Engine Marketing (Pay Per Click) is paid inclusions as seen Sponsored Results on engines based on pay per click. This marketing tool has been increased enormously in these years, even with expensive per click rates. In some keywords or phrases a click may cost 10€ ( online dating industry) whether visit converts to a lead or not. Ads buyers are ready to pay these high per click bills because SEM efforts bring more revenue than they spent. How this technology works while displaying the ads? Lets say few words about Google Adwords. Google has 2 different networks such as search network and content network. Search network means Google powered search results that you may see on any website with a search bar using Google’s search technology. Content network is different spidering technology and matching the search query and web site content. If you have a web site with high quality and useful content, you may apply and get involved Google’s Adsense network to make money. Google will classify your content and display related ads when a search query is matched as you have probably seen Ads by Google on web.

If SEO and SEM are powerful marketing tools which is the best and effective on sales conversion rates? This is the fatal question, both have advantages changing to the case, then lets compare:

A)In SEM, your web site does not need a change in most cases. If you want high conversion rates, a SEM professional should prepare high quality landing page is necessary only, not your entire design. On the other hand SEO may require some major design changes to get good spidering by engines.

B)PPC Ads charged when clicked only, displaying your ads will not cost you anything but poor Click Through Rates will increase your minimum per click costs. SEO visits are free of charge as visitors comes by clicking the natural search results from a search engine. Most visitors likely to trust a site they find on a search engine, they feel like natural results have been approved by the search engine.

C) SEM brings very quick results to analyze your campaign while SEO effects can take long time on ranking. On Adwords, just 15 minutes is enough to display your campaign on screen but SEO results may take up to 3 months on engine’s ranking.

D) ROI and Conversion rates are higher in SEM because you may design different landing pages according to your major products or services with price charts, feature comparison tables .However in SEO, you can not make these much because your most powerful PR page is your homepage so your sub pages which includes your product specification will not get listed higher than your main page.

E) Targeting is easy in SEM with campaign settings option. You may target national ,regional or international geographical areas depending on your shipping options. Google has features to promote your local business with accessing your business address or just selecting distribution area on Google Map. Another useful tool is matching options are enables you to select broad ,phrase,exacxt or negative matches while displaying your ads.When you prefer SEO, you can not prepare different target pages as they will be sub pages and will not get listed higher than your main page as above.

F) SEM limits you with your budget because your ads campaign will stop displaying when your daily, keywords or monthly budget is reached while SEO results longer even months after optimization work is done.

Finally who wins this match? Well, this depends on your expectation, budget and targets from your campaigns. As long years professional , I dont have a preference . Each business needs different campaigns, you may select to attract new clients in both tools while achieving your corporate targets.

Ladies and Gentlemen, unforgettable match is about to start in Madison Square Garden, please sit back and watch this.

About the Writer: Mr. Erkan Meydanlioglu has a degree in Economics and professional Online Marketing Manager , Google Certified Professional and Team Leader for more than 9 years. He is managing corporate online campaigns as individual or as team manager in Europe. Training company level marketing teams to increase esales

[gigabyte]

Good job! You have illustrated some good key points to decribe the difference between Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing techniques.

One suggestion is to cut down on the verbage and highlight just the key points.

[MattK]

I reckon "Search Engine Marketing" is a term made up by people who couldn't get their sites to rank well for the term "Search Engine Optimization".

[damien_ls]

Originally Posted by MattK

I reckon "Search Engine Marketing" is a term made up by people who couldn't get their sites to rank well for the term "Search Engine Optimization".

Surely one is marketing via organic search, the other is marketing via adwords etc.? Therefore they're different things - but I guess you're ultimately correct (if you're ranked #1 then why bother with adwords?).

[Redfly]

Originally Posted by damien_ls

(if you're ranked #1 then why bother with adwords?).

Ehhhh.... Branding? Dominating screen real estate?

Have a read of an article I wrote on this last week:
http://www.redflymarketing.com/blog/...ld-be-friends/

[damien_ls]

Originally Posted by Redflystudios

Ehhhh.... Branding? Dominating screen real estate?

Fair point, and an interesting read. I guess I should re-phrase my thoughts:

If you're #1, you may have less reason to consider PPC for those keywords because you already have a presence at the forefront of the search listings. However, taking your views into consideration, you may benefit from hitting page 2 on PPC (since some users start looking towards adwords after organic search results start to dry up), or just to cover the page with your name.

I have issues with the latter part though - whilst it may well build brand recognition, there are industries where being "the giant" is considered a bad thing (to some customers at least) and therefore you may discourage potential customers from you if you're too heavy-handed about it.

Anyway, I'll bow to your greater experience in this area, and take your word for it

[Redfly]

Originally Posted by damien_ls

Fair point, and an interesting read. I guess I should re-phrase my thoughts:

If you're #1, you may have less reason to consider PPC for those keywords because you already have a presence at the forefront of the search listings. However, taking your views into consideration, you may benefit from hitting page 2 on PPC (since some users start looking towards adwords after organic search results start to dry up), or just to cover the page with your name.

I have issues with the latter part though - whilst it may well build brand recognition, there are industries where being "the giant" is considered a bad thing (to some customers at least) and therefore you may discourage potential customers from you if you're too heavy-handed about it.

Anyway, I'll bow to your greater experience in this area, and take your word for it

HAHA, Don't be silly.

You made a very VERY good point, one I had not even thought of for that article. A second page presence. Easily attainable with a low bid and position preference.