SEO or SEM?

There are two main areas for online marketing, which we will describe in more detail below. Retriever Web Solutions offer both services and we hope to educate you into which is best and most important for different options.

SEO – Search Engine Optimisation

Search engine optimisation (SEO) involves building new websites or changing existing websites, so that they rank highly in a search engine’s organic listings when users search on terms that are related to the site’s content. To learn about SEO for Google organic search results, visit Google’s Webmaster Central site.

SEM – Search Engine Marketing

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is the process of promoting and marketing a website through paid listings (advertisements) on search engines.

In order to create an ad for a given search engine, you need to create an account with the advertising product or branch of that search engine. For Google, this product is AdWords. After creating an account, you then create your ad and enter a list of user search queries – called “keywords” – that can trigger your ad to be displayed.

Ads on most search engines operate on a pay-per-click (PPC) model, meaning that you pay only when a user clicks your ad, and not for the ad impression (the instance in which the ad appears on the page). The other common pricing model in online advertising is cost per thousand impressions (CPM), in which you pay per impression, not for any clicks on your ad.

Site owners often choose to advertise their site instead of, or in addition to, optimising their site for placement in the organic search results. Although it’s necessary to pay for the clicks that your ads receive, advertising allows you to be proactive about when and where a listing for your site appears. Creating an AdWords account takes minutes, and ads can run almost immediately in response to keywords that you choose.

Using a company like Retriever, we can manage the Adwords service for you, increasing click through rates and decreasing costs. We use Google to oversee the campaign and using their massive resources can make a cost effective service for you.

Working together, a fully optimised website for SEO, can improve click through rates by using SEM like Google Adwords by 20%.

There are people who search the internet that are very wary of clicking on Adverts, and many do prefer the generic approach to click on websites in search results. So the cost effective solution is to get your site optimised for search engines (SEO) and using Google Adwords (SEM) for when  you need to increase customer awareness for a particular new service or product.

Call our sales team on 01903 250441 for a personal consultation on using digital marketing services. Or fill out our SEM or SEO contact page.