SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the most viable and cost-effective way for brands to both understand and reach customers in key moments that matter.
Furthermore, location-based optimizations for real search terms such as “movie studios NYC” focus on cities and states to establish a viable medium for your business’s marketing efforts on a local level.
Search marketing increases website traffic and online visibility via search engines, using paid and organic advertising. Optimizing your website for search engines, commonly known as SEO, is the organic approach to driving traffic to your company website. Pay-per-Click (PPC), or SEM, involves budgets for purchasing website traffic via PAID search listings on Google or partner sites.
ORGANIC (SEO)
SEO is a key element of any business’s digital marketing strategy. It controls how well your website performs on the search results page (SERP) of Google. The disparity between being #1 and #10 on Google can mean the difference between a thriving business and one with no traffic. Maintaining your website’s SEO is crucial and should be done consistently.
SEO is broken up into three core areas:
- On-Page SEO consists of creating content that is relevant, high-quality, and consistent to the focal point of your company’s marketing strategy, targeting your ideal audience/demo by including specific keywords and related search terms. This process involves creating web pages that are based on your focus keywords. Think of every brand-new page on your website as another net being cast into the ocean to catch more fish.
- Off-Page SEO boosts your website’s authority through acquiring hyperlinks back to your website from other niche-relevant authoritative sites, strategically aimed at boosting desirable keyword positions in search results.
- Technical SEO involves fine-tuning your website’s “under the hood” elements, such as user experience, indexation, and optimizing the search engine crawling budget. (IE: fixing the broken links on the “Services” page. These are links that point to non-existent web addresses)
PAID (SEM/PPC)
Paid marketing has an immediate impact and gives your brand a much larger reach and exposure due to first-page exposure.
Google Search Ads are the sponsored results you see at the top, bottom, and sidebar of a Google search results page. They are an effective way to have your website dominate the SERP for people with queries or keywords relating to your brand or business.
Another form of paid marketing is Google Display Advertising, which comes in the form of text, rich media, banner ads, and pop-up ads that serve as visually engaging ads on the sidebars or top banners of websites, apps, and Google-owned properties such as YouTube and Gmail.
A PPC strategy combined with a well-thought-out content strategy can help you dominate Google by gradually building your brand authority. However, generating traffic with search ads will not help your website’s organic SEO because Google can differentiate between the traffic that is organic versus paid.
Additionally, Organic SEO should be seen as an investment, while SEM, or Paid Marketing, is merely a never-ending advertising cost. Yes, making tweaks to your ad copy, keyword bidding, and ad placements can progressively improve the quality of the generated leads. Still, other than that, PPC benefits do not develop over time.
Twenty-four months into an ad campaign, you’ll still be paying an increasing fixed amount for every person who clicks on your ad. Realistically, you’ll only see more reliable results if you increase your spending.
Our SEO approach would begin with solidifying a healthy technical foundation because if search engines can’t find your content, they can’t reward you with visibility.
Once we’ve assured that search engines can easily, speedily, and conveniently access your content, we analyze your target audiences and the search landscape to know what it will take for your site to show up at the top of search engine results.
Finally, I would like to remind you that there are an infinite number of keywords and semantic phrases that we could optimize your site for, but it is ideal, to begin with, low-hanging fruit. Which are highly competitive search queries that we call “money keywords.”
These keywords have a significant search volume as well as buyer intent, the phrases people use when they are looking to buy a product, book a dance lesson, try a new service, and so on.