First of all, a very happy new year to the handful of people reading our first blog post of 2017. All of us at DanMatt Media hope you have a wonderful year ahead of you.
Ok, onto the topic at hand. One of the biggest questions I’m asked by prospective digital marketing clients is the difference between SEO and SEM (pay per click). Both channels use the world’s largest search engines (Google and Bing) to advertise your company’s products and services. Both have ads that are triggered by select keywords that are relevant to the type of business you have. And both are an outstanding way to advertise and reach/sign new clients.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is organic search, meaning you are not paying everytime someone clicks on your ad. As such, budget is not a concern, and your organic ad will run 24/7. It will never come down. Our version of SEO involves both on-site work (optimizing your meta data and title tags, rewriting content, adding schema optimization, etc) and off-site work (custom link building, video SEO promotion, citation building, etc). Both are necessary to improve your rankings and drive more eyeballs to your website.
The great aspects of SEO are that it is always less expensive than pay per click, and that your ad will never come down due to budget restrictions. The downside to SEO is that it takes time to reach page 1 of Google. Typically at least 6 months, and sometimes it can take a year to get there.
With SEM (pay per click) you ARE paying everytime someone clicks on your ad. When your daily or monthly budget is exhausted, your ads will no longer show until your budget renews (the next day or the next month). As such, you must have a large enough budget to be able to run your campaign for at least a few hours per day, and at least 4 or 5 days per week. Your budget has to be robust enough to allow you to bid on at least some of the important keywords that you are after. What all of this means is that the downside to SEM is that it is always more expensive than SEO.
But the great value-add that a DanMatt Media SEM campaign brings to the table is day 1 results. You will literally be on page 1 of Google, in the coveted Top 4 positions at the top of the page, for at least some of the keywords you need right away. We will not take-on a new SEM campaign if the budget doesn’t allow us to obtain some of those top ranking positions, so what you are getting for the increased price is immediate results. With SEM, you’re going to start receiving phone call leads in your very first month.
There are always trade-offs in life, and marketing is no exception. SEO should be viewed as a longterm marketing solution that you use every single month. It is less expensive than SEM, but takes longer to generate an ROI. On the other hand, SEM campaigns can be run seasonally (they are perfect for seasonal businesses) and generate immediate results. They are more expensive, but typically obtain a positive ROI very quickly. Whatever your marketing needs may be, we can help you. Give us a call or send us a website inquiry to find out which service is right for you.
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