If you are exploring different online channels to promote your business and make it grow, you’ve probably come across the two popular terms, SEM and SEO. Search engine marketing and search engine optimization are both used by marketers to increase their business’s online visibility and drive more visitors to their business website. Yes, they are both the means of getting traffic through search engines, but they are not the same. So, what’s the difference between SEM and SEO? Let’s explore!
The Primary Difference Between SEM and SEO
There’s a subtle difference between SEM and SEO. The prime focus of SEO or search engine optimization is on improving the website so that it appears higher in the SERPs, bringing more organic traffic to your website.
SEM, on the other hand, focuses on the use of SEO alongside paid strategies like PPC advertising to generate organic and paid traffic to your website.
SEM vs SEO: a Comparison of Similarities and Differences
Now that you understand what sets SEM and SEO apart, let’s do a quick comparison of the two digital marketing strategies. Here’s a brief overview of their similarities and differences.
The Cost of SEM vs SEO
There are multiple factors that drive the cost of SEM and SEO, including:
The Time Required for SEM vs SEO to Work
There are distinct differences between the two marketing strategies, especially when it’s about how long each of them takes to bring you the results. Generally, however, SEM can produce instant results after you launch your ads while SEO can take around 3-6 months for noticeable gains. The turnaround time can vary based on various factors. For instance, to get the desired results from your SEM campaigns, you might require a few weeks of advertising data for targeting better and increasing conversions.
SEM vs SEO: Which Is Better?
So, yes, the two are different, but which of them is a better marketing strategy? SEM or SEO? To be honest, they both have benefits that a business should not ignore. Ideally, they should be used together. However, if you have to choose only one of these, then opt for SEO.
SEO offers an effective and reliable strategy to gain website traffic, increase leads, and generate more revenue. Furthermore, it is generally a more cost-effective approach compared to SEM. Nevertheless, to get the best results, you should formulate an SEO strategy encompassing SEM. Together, SEO and SEM will give you more traffic, better leads, and increased sales through multiple channels.
How to Combine SEO and SEM?
Both SEM and SEO rely heavily on keywords to generate traffic. Even though they use different marketing techniques, when people search for your targeted keywords, they will find what they are looking for either through organic results or paid ones. And, when you have used both the marketing techniques, you’ll be right up there at the top of SERPs.
SEM can complement your SEO efforts, but for SEM to work, your website must be SEO-friendly. If so, you have a better shot at success through SEM. SEO lays the foundation for SEM, and when they are both set up properly, you are more likely to get high-quality traffic to your website along with improved conversion rates.
So, choose the right keywords to optimize your website for and target them in your sponsored ads to get a better shot at appearing at the top of free and paid searches.
Online businesses need to tap the right marketing channels to increase their sales and grow, and PPC is one of them. By targeting the right PPC keywords, you can connect with your target audience and make the most of your PPC campaigns. But how do you find the best PPC keywords for your PPC campaign? Of course, with proper research! Researching the right keywords for your campaign may involve several steps, but the process is pretty simple. Let’s take you step by step and understand how you can find the winning keywords for your PPC campaigns.
1. Set The Goals For Your PPC Campaign
You can’t choose the best keywords for your campaign unless you have a clear goal in your mind. So, first define the goals you want to achieve with your PPC campaign and then begin your keyword research. Here are a couple of goals you’d want to keep in mind:
With these goals, you can get an idea about the search intent of the visitors – what’s on their mind when they click your ad. Make sure you pick keywords that align with your goals and the objectives of your website visitors.
2. Brainstorm Keyword Ideas
With the goals set, start brainstorming keyword ideas. Write down the terms that come to your mind. Put yourself in your audiences’ shoes and think about what they’d search for when looking for your products or services. For better organization, you should create keyword lists and put all your keywords into different categories. The categories can include:
After doing the guesswork, move on to the next step.
3. Do Competitor Research
Another straightforward method to come across the best PPC keywords is to look into your competitors and see what they are targeting. With proper competitor research, you can even find out the keywords they are bidding on the most and what they are already ranking for. Try to find high-value keywords that might benefit you and determine what your competitors are spending on those keywords. Outbid them to seal the top spot and take away some high-value traffic.
4. Use Keyword Research Tools
You can also use free and paid tools to create your own keyword list. Some reliable names here include:
These tools come with plenty of intuitive features and can pinpoint the best keywords that will yield great results for your PPC campaign.
5. Don’t Overlook Keyword Metrics
Once you have prepared your keyword lists using all the methods above, choose the right keywords to target by looking into some keyword metrics. Two key metrics that you can’t afford to overlook are Search Volume and Cost-Per-Click (CPC). To get the best results, you should be targeting keywords that have high monthly search volume and higher CPC. Just make sure that the CPC is not too high for your budget.
Finding the best PPC keywords is crucial for running successful PPC campaigns. You should take your time and do thorough research to find the best keywords to boost your ROI.
PPC click fraud is still a huge problem for business owners as fraudulent clicks waste advertising budget and render all your PPC reports and analytics completely inaccurate. But did you know that the easiest way to protect your PPC ads from click fraud is to use the Google Ads IP exclusion tool? In this article, we'll show you how it can help.
What is the IP Exclusion Tool in Google Ads?
The Google Ads IP Exclusion Tool is the section of Google Ads where you can specify the IP addresses you want to block from seeing your ad.
The IP exclusion tool lets you block clicks from IP addresses that you have recognized as fraudulent or irrelevant. This translates into substantial cost savings:
How to Use the Google Ads IP Exclusion Tool?
You can exclude malicious and fraudulent IP addresses right from your Google Ads account by following these simple steps:
Please note that the IP exclusion tool is not available for video campaigns, App campaigns, Smart Display campaigns, and Discovery campaigns.
How to Identify Fraudulent IP Addresses?
All right, so now you know how to ban certain IP addresses from viewing and clicking on your ads. But how do you actually get a list of IP addresses to exclude in the first place? ClickReport will help you with that.
It logs the IP addresses of website and landing pages visitors, and notifies you immediately if it detects multiple ad clicks from the same IP address. You will then be able to block malicious IP addresses from your Google Ads dashboard as described above and thus prevent click fraud.
A well-run pay-per-click (PPC) campaign, whether it's on Google Ads or Microsoft Advertising, can bring in new customers and get buyers and visitors who have been there before to come back. But if you've been running paid search campaigns for a while and you don't feel like your results are getting better, it might be time to re-evaluate how well PPC is working for you.
Let's go over five PPC tips that will help you get the most out of your paid search efforts and improve how well they work.
How can I make my PPC campaign perform better?
To get ahead in paid search, you need to focus on getting the most conversions by optimizing your campaigns in many ways. There are a lot of PPC strategies you can use to improve the performance of your campaigns, even though it might seem like an exciting process.
Common ways to improve your Google Ads campaigns range from small changes like turning off add suggestions to testing different audience segments and full-on automated bidding strategies.
Does PPC influence SEO?
Beginners to PPC often think that PPC has a direct effect on SEO rankings. In reality, though, paid ads don't have a direct effect on where a site ranks in a natural search. After all, one of Google's main goals is to show searchers the most relevant organic results to their queries, not the most relevant results from brands with the most money to spend on ads.
Keeping this in mind, SEO and PPC can work well together to help you make a marketing plan that helps your business and gives you benefits like more SERP real estate and a consistent brand experience. In the end, combining PPC and SEO may be your best bet for getting people to visit your business quickly and improving your online presence for long-term success.
Here are 5 PPC tips that will help your campaign do better
For PPC campaigns to be successful, you need to spend a lot of time and money on building and testing different strategies, as well as keeping track of how well they are doing. Still, even your best campaigns might not do as well as you expected if the market, consumer behavior, your competitors, or the ad platform itself changes. Here are some tried-and-true PPC tips you can start using right away to help to improve your PPC campaign.
1. Determine your goals
A key part of a successful PPC campaign is setting clear goals from the start. Your goal could be to get more sales leads, make more money, or spread the word. No matter what your goals are, you should keep in mind that they should be clear, measurable, attainable, realistic, and tied to a time frame. In turn, the key performance metrics (KPIs) related to these goals, such as your CPA (cost per acquisition) or conversion rate, will help decide important parts of the campaign, such as how much you spend on ads and what they say.
2. Make use of geo-targeting
Geo-targeting, also known as local PPC, is a way to reach people in a certain area. Using the best practices for geo-targeting in Google Ads lets you make campaigns that send your message to prospects based on where they are geographically. Local PPC can help a lot with performance optimization.
For example, it lets you write ad copy that takes into account things that are unique to a certain location, like keywords or phrases that only locals know. This will make more sense to your audience and make them more likely to get involved. So, the more appealing your ad is to your users, the more likely it is that your click-through rate (CTR) will go up and you'll get more qualified prospects.
3. Incorporate automation
Google Ads has really stepped up its game with the rise of automation. The machine learning algorithms on the platform are always getting better. Eventually, they will be able to take over all of the manual work that advertisers do with ad copy, bidding, and targeting.
For example, Google's new Performance Max campaign type uses machine learning to improve performance across all of Google's networks, such as YouTube, Search, Display, and Gmail. One of the best things you can do to improve your account is to take advantage of PMax campaigns. They are driven by your brand's unique goals, and the automation uses all of the accessible data to create and deliver ads that add the most value to these goals.
4. Use audience segmentation
Redefining your audience is another effective strategy to improve the effectiveness of a paid campaign. Because your audience is one of the most important foundations of successful marketing, you must target the appropriate users with the appropriate product or service.
Audience segmentation focuses on key elements of your target audience and can considerably boost the possibility that potential buyers will click on your ad and take action. Marketing audiences are fundamentally categorized based on distinguishing criteria such as demographics, psychographics, behavior, and geographic location.
Google Ads, as well as Microsoft Advertising, provide a plethora of alternatives for observing how different audiences interact with your ad or only targeting users from the most appropriate audiences for your business.
5. Incorporate remarketing
An effective remarketing campaign shows ads to people who have already used your website or app. This makes them want to come back and give you another chance. Remarketing can support the buyer's journey by attracting prospects' attention with information that will help them re-evaluate your deal and see it as the best choice for them. But if you want results, you have to get users to care.
Through comparison landing pages, you can show off your use cases, benefits, and features. You can also help prospects compare you to the competition.