Posts Tagged: sem services

Internet marketing is all the same right?  If you’re reasonably intelligent, anyone can do it!  I’ve heard that opinion from countless people.  They think they know what their customers are looking for, and they think they have a great eye for website design (everyone seems to think they do).  In reality, those people are breaking one of the most important internet marketing, and marketing in general, principles that you’d be taught in your first business course: you are not your customer.

Once you come to this realization, you start to think about it, and suddenly it hits you how complex a problem something like SEO or SEM really is.  Before long, you’re convincing yourself that you need a professional to take care of it for you – no sales pitch needed at all.  The kind of research that goes into producing an effective SEO strategy or a profitable SEM strategy is substantial.  And they’re both different.  SEO, or search engine optimization, focuses on organic traffic that you get for free from search engines.  SEM, or search engine management, is the management of pay-per-click campaigns to maximize revenue.  They aren’t substitutes for one another – they’re different tactics, and it’s important to realize that.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

On-Page Factors: Since robots haven’t yet become impressive free-thinkers, the people at Google just have to code them the best they can.  And SEO is basically the process of having a nice conversation with this robots and making them realize how awesome your web presence is based on a set of keywords.  From setting up a proper site architecture to tagging images, there’s a lot to do to make your website readable.  Title and description tags, content generation, and text importance factors all play in to on-page optimization.

Off-Page Factors: When we talk about off-page factors, we’re talking about links.  Not only do you want a lot of links going to your website, you want links from reputable websites.  The better the website, plus more links, plus a few other factors like link anchor text on page content all factor in.  The execution of a link building strategy will target great sites based on your budget and emphasize the keywords you want.

Domain Information: Facts about your website like domain registration dates, secure hosting, number of pages, and maybe other factors like how long you’ve owned the domain could play a role.  Google uses these factors because the longer you’ve been around the more they “trust” you – so people can’t just register new domains and fly up to the top of the rankings.

Search Engine Management (SEM)

This marketing tactic is all about ROI.  You pay X amount for each visitor on specific keywords, and you get Y returns.  The job of an SEM consultant is to find the cases where Y > X, work to reduce costs, and focus the expenditure on profitable segments.   There are a number of ways that sem services can accomplish this, but it boils down to finding pockets of profits in your target market due to a very competitive advertising environment, and maximizing the exposure there.  You may think you can do it yourself, but when you’re talking about advanced segmentation and a few percentages being the difference between profit and loss, the professionals are going to come out on top more likely than not.

Internet marketing doesn’t end there.  By hiring a web analytics consulting company, you can maximize on-page conversions – which benefits every kind of external marketing you’re doing and raises the ROI’s across the board.