Webmentor Ireland

SEO = Search Engine Optimisation

SEM = Search Engine Marketing

The terms SEO and SEM are important to understand because although they are fundamentally two different things, they are normally used in combination for the purpose of making a website successful on the internet.

 

Irish Business Spending on SEO and SEM

According to the latest surveys conducted by E-Consultancy, Irish business is spending roughly:

40% on SEO, 60% on SEM (in the form of paid search)

 

Definition of SEO and SEM in plain English:

SEO is the art of making your website rank highly with Search Engines.

SEM is that art of driving traffic to your website – eg by using online advertising, Google Adwords, directory links and, of course, SEO.

If the purpose of SEO is to achieve high rankings with Search Engines - (so thatYOU CAN BE FOUND), then the purpose of SEM is all of the following –

• Your link clicked (as opposed to your rivals), AND
• Conversions of your website visitors into leads/sales.

Obviously SEO and SEM are related but different. They go hand in hand and the assessing the right dose of each is what makes for a successful website ROI.

 

SERPs and SEO – why ranking highly with Search Engines matters!

Whenever keywords are typed into a Search Engine (see Diag. 1 below), you will get back a page of results, these pages are called Search Engine Results Pages, or SERPs.

 

Diag.1 Typing Keyword(s) into a Search Engine

 

The page you see immediately after you've typed in keywords and clicked the Search button is the first page of the SERPs. This page will list the top ten results, ranked 1-10, for the keywords searched. If you clicked onto the second page of results, you'd see the next 10 – ie ranked 11-20, and so on. (To see what the SERPs look like, refer to Diag.2)

This is also why the first step in SEO involves fastidious keyword research –  we need to know what keywords people are using to find businesses like yours. Once we know what those keywords are, the end game is to have a page from your website ranking 1-10 for those keywords, so that you can effectively be found by people using Search Engines. (Ranked 11? Too bad. Its on the next page of the SERPs. Only 1 in 10 going that far, see?)

 

Understanding the difference between Organic Rankings and Paid Listings

Its not completely true to say this but for the sake of simplicity, let us say that:

Organic Listings [aka Natural Listings] = SEO
Paid Listings [aka Sponsored Links] = SEM

When you use Google to look for webpages, the results that Google brings back can be divided into 2 types of result – organic and paid. Have a look at the diagram below:

 

Diag 2. SERPS, organic and paid listings

 

An Organic Listing is free!

How does it happen? It happens because if a Search Engine considers that a page on your website is particularly relevant for the keywords that the visitor used, (plus a couple of other factors like the age of your website, authority, trust, links in, links out and so on), then the Search Engine will give your most relevant webpage a ranking for that keyword(s). If you're ranked 1-10 for those keyword(s), then you'll appear on the first page of the SERPs. You cannot pay Google to adjust your keyword rank. You can, however, pay an SEO expert to try to increase it for your chosen keywords.

SEM, on the other hand, would be looking to the Paid (Sponsored) Listings which Google calls Google Adwords. If you can outbid your rivals, your listing will show up on the first page of the SERPs, as shown in Diagram 2 above. These are always marked as 'Sponsored Listings' in Google. The advantage of a paid listing is that the text/code of your webpage doesn't have to be relevant for the keyword used. You'll choose SEM because you don't have a high enough organic ranking to get onto the first page of the SERPs.

 

Factor in Some Dubious Statistics...

The traditional figure quoted is 75% of users will click on organic and 25% on paid (sponsored link).

However, those figures are regularly disputed. Recently a very large and reputable Irish firm told me that their figures suggested that 30% of users click organic and 70% click on paid search. I tried hard not to choke on my milk and biscuits. I mean, ask yourself roughly how often you would click on a paid listing compared to an organic result? IMO the traditional 75-25 split is probably about right on average (for most of the moon's phases).

 

What does SEO involve?

Briefly, it involves 2 things:

1. Optimising code and text on the webpages themselves to show up keywords that are relevant to your business/service and popularly used by the public AND
2. Getting quality links from other websites (search engines read that as a sign that your pages are both popular and authoritative and possibly also relevant for a particular keyword combination. Giving other relevant websites quality links out can work too, by the way.)

 

What does SEM involve?

SEM involves any activity which increases the flow of traffic and conversions (lead generation/sales) on your website. Typical activities would involve:

Google Adwords, media campaign, SEO, advertising on the internet, listing in popular internet directories/blogs/social networks, etc. In the main you will pay for these listings.

Anything else?

SEO is a longterm effort and getting results can be slow. However, if you arrive in positions 1-4 of the organic results for a keyword(s), you will be well-placed to receive an entire 50% of the potential clicks for that page. Rankings don't last forever, but they are long-term compared to SEM. Finally, positive results from SEO are always good for SEM.

SEM is short-term and almost always more costly than SEO. The results are rapid. Should you stop paying, your listings will vanish. And to answer one last hairy chestnut – your Google Adwords campaign will have no effect whatsoever on your organic rankings! In other words, SEM doesn't pay back to SEO...