When we create a business website, the first challenge is to appear on the searches when people look for your product, service, business, or any competitor that can be related to yours on Google or any other search engine. I’ve worked with this type of challenge, and it is not easy. The ideal goal is to appear on the first page of the search engine when someone looks for your business or when they generally look for businesses or products on the web that are related. For example, If I search on Google “shoes for men,” it will appear many different websites where shoes for men are being sold. Imagine you have a shoe store. Your goal is to appear on the first page along with the other competitors when I search, so you can be one of the options I can select when clicking on a website. How can you be there?
To appear on the first page of the search engine, your website may have a strong SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategy. This strategy may take time, approximately six months, to be on the first page (it will depend on the competition; it can take less or more time). Most of the time, business owners want to be on the first page as soon as possible to be one of the options where consumers can buy their product or service. The way I’ve had success in the past with this type of situation is by running an SEM (Search Engine Marketing) campaign along with the SEO strategy.
SEM is the foundation of paid digital marketing. It is the practice of paying the search engine by CPC (cost per click) to be first or second when a consumer searches for anything related to your product or service or even if they search for the actual business.
CPC (Cost per Click): measurement of the amount of money you pay when a consumer clicks your ad.
Every time you appear on the first page because of your SEM campaign and a user clicks your ad, you will be charged a certain amount. The way this works is by bidding. In the same way that an advertiser pays to appear on the first page, your competitors are probably doing the same. Imagine five companies are running an SEM campaign for their shoe store. All five cannot appear first, obviously, so how will this be managed? All five will place a bid, and the highest will win the first place. This bidding activity happens within seconds. When you place an SEM campaign, you program an automated bidding strategy that will be in charge of conducting the practice.
As I said, running SEM along with SEO efforts will help to increase your awareness and improve your position on the search engine. This will help to bring significant traffic to your website, assisting the SEO. Bringing traffic to the website will help with the position of your website since one of the aspects to improve your search position is decent traffic on your website.
A good idea is to create two SEM campaigns based on your brand and another one based on the product or service that your company offers (a non-brand campaign is what they call it in the industry). This way, you are creating some type of “marketing funnel” approach to lead the consumer from getting to know about your business to making them learn your business name. In the future, when they look for your name, the SEO strategy should already position the website on the first page. The consumer can click on your website directly without the advertiser paying for that click.
Difference between SEO and SEM results in the search engine:
- What it is inside the green square is SEM. You Can see it says “Ads” next to the URL, and the top results were appear a couple of different options for shoes. You can see that it is the first result when searching for tennis shoes.
- In the red square, that’s SEO. It is an organic position based on words and codifications in the content of the webpage that helps to gain a top position when consumers search for your type of product or your brand.
It is essential that once you start driving traffic to your website, the users spend specific amounts of time to make Google understand that your website is valuable. This approach will help not only to be the first on the search page but also to start getting conversions at an early stage of a website. To have a conversion, you must ensure your website has a conversion-centered design. In my last post, I provided some resources and discussed some aspects of how you can create a website that will avoid distractions to lead consumers to take action (convert) on your website.
This is like a chain; everything needs to be interconnected to reach success. It would help if you were one of the first options when someone looks for a product or service; once users start going into your website, your design needs to be well designed to provide a great user experience that can lead them to buy or provide any information you are looking for. Website health must be on point. If not, your position in the search engine will be affected. The brand needs to be connected with the message you are communicating in the SEM campaign, and the website should have a primary goal that all these aspects will help to achieve.
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