Why SEO and SEM are Essential to Your Digital Marketing Success

Why SEO and SEM are Essential to Your Digital Marketing Success

Digital marketing has many layers. Combining multiple strategies can help small businesses put more muscle behind their marketing efforts — and ultimately drive revenue. A robust plan typically includes digital ads, web content, video content, social media, email and more. That’s where SEO and SEM come into play. When done right, they can help round out your overall digital marketing plan in a big way.

Search engines can be a powerful way to connect with your target demographic. You just have to know how to work with them. BrandMinded is an SEO and SEM firm Tampa can trust. We’ve been at this a long time and rely on data-driven solutions in all we do. Let’s unpack why SEO and SEM are essential to your digital marketing success.

What is SEO?

“Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the practice of improving your content and your website to boost your ranking, specifically on Google,” says Matthew Hall, Senior SEO/SEM Specialist at BrandMinded.

To get to the top of Google search results, businesses need to create content that helps searchers find what they’re looking for and have a positive search experience. This is the heart of Google’s recent helpful content update. It’s designed to prioritize people-first content — and devalue clickbait and unhelpful content.

“When we’re talking about SEO, we’re talking about making sure that the content and the website are up to par with Google standards so that it will rank higher,” says Hall. “By default, that usually helps the ranking on other platforms as well because other platforms, like Yahoo and Bing, largely model their algorithms off of the Google algorithm.”

What does SEO look like in practice? Instead of trying to manipulate your content and your Google ranking, SEO involves optimizing your website and blog posts so that they’re:

  • Authentic and reflect the voice of the brand
  • Original (not published elsewhere online)
  • Helpful to your audience and tailored to their needs

What is SEM?

Advertising is a huge revenue source for Google. In 2021, the search giant brought in over $209 billion dollars in ad revenue. After typing in a search query, you’ve probably noticed advertised search results that pop up at the top of the results page.

“Depending on which search query you’re looking at now, someone could have the organic rank as number one, but you don’t even see them at the top of the page,” says Hall. “You actually have to scroll down to even get to them because there are ads on top of it.”

SEM, which stands for search engine marketing, leverages search result ads to your advantage. Google ads can also appear within the shopping tab, on Google Maps, or on Google search partner websites.

How SEO and SEM Work Together in Digital Marketing

While SEO is extremely important to improving your search ranking and getting organic traffic, SEM is equally valuable. The two work hand in hand. Hall says the goal is to strengthen SEO to the point where you can eventually decrease your advertising spend.

“The truth is that if anyone wants to get business immediately, they have to spend money on ads if they want any sort of rank or visibility on Google,” he says. “A lot of people want to be first organically, but that’s a lot longer of a strategy, especially to do it properly.”

The Google Ads platform can get you moving in the right direction in terms of generating leads. Consider it part of your overarching digital marketing plan. One side of the coin is growing your organic ranking — the other is SEM. With SEM, we can turn on the faucet tomorrow and get that traffic flowing while you build out your SEO strategy.

“As an agency, we have employees who are dedicated to analyzing the data we receive on a regular basis,” says Hall. “We are always checking campaigns. Without the right guidance, you could easily spend $1,000 in a day and get nothing for it if there’s even a small error in your configuration. There are lots of nuances, and BrandMinded understands them.”

Ready to take your digital marketing plan to the next level? Contact us today to get started.

Custom Holiday Social Graphics

Custom Holiday Social Graphics

First and foremost, Happy Labor Day! Everyone loves a day off, and even more so, everyone loves to post about their day off. Even as a business, staying on this trend is essential.

Celebrating and recognizing holidays on your social channels can be a great way to gain favor with your followers while also filling up your content calendars. Creating custom graphics paired with a uniquely crafted holiday message in the caption is a no-brainer. This gives your brand the opportunity to share what is important to your employees and advocate for causes that mean something to your company.

Browse our gallery of Labor Day graphics we’ve created for our clients this year below!

Case Study: Increase Organic Traffic 315% Year Over Year

Case Study: Increase Organic Traffic 315% Year Over Year

Here is a quick update on one of our clients viscogenorlando.com and how they have benefitted from our search engine optimization (SEO) services over the past year. For ViscoGen, we develop quality original content for them multiple times per month and also manage their back end technical SEO work including on page optimizations, site speed optimizations, schema markup, and more.

Search engine optimization is usually referred to as a “long-game” because it takes time for quality content to be indexed and then ranked by Google. Over the past year, Google has had multiple updates to their algorithm to favor sites that are creating quality original content and also making sure all pages on the site are easily digestible to both Desktop users, Mobile users, and the Google spider.

For this particular client, when we compare Organic Traffic (traffic from the major search engines) between 2022 and 2021, we can see that they have had a 315% increase in the amount of users. This has taken them from receiving less than 500 users to their website per month to now receiving over 4,500, solely from their Organic rankings. That means they had 7,096 users in 2020 and almost 30,000 users in 2021!

Many agencies and a quick search online will show you that a 20% increase in organic traffic year over year is a positive trend. This chart goes to show that with proper SEO management and quality content. It is possible to far surpass that baseline.

What to achieve these results for your business? Contact us today!

 

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