NJ SEO Services vs. SEM Services: What’s the difference?
As search engines become more advanced, there is quite a bit of work that has to go into your digital marketing strategy to outshine your competitors. Gone are the days of building a website and adding in some keywords that you’d like your company to be found for, on the home page. Find out what the difference is between SEO services (search engine optimization) and SEM services (search engine marketing) in order to guide your digital marketing strategy. And if the idea of it is overwhelming, the pros at Reclaim Digital are here to take over your NJ SEO services needs!
Search Engine Optimization
Have you ever wondered how to help more people find your website? Well, at Reclaim Digital we have a lot of experience helping New Jersey businesses successfully increase web traffic. One of the best ways to do this is through Search Engine Optimization (SEO). The NJ SEO services market is thriving, and we at Reclaim digital want Garden State business owners to make full use of it.
As of today, there are over a 130 million websites registered all over the internet. To sort through all of it most of us rely on search engines to find what we want, and these search engines have become so good that over 90% of the people using the internet rely on them to find things. Now, there are a lot of various search engines out there but 83% of people worldwide use the dominating brand known as Google.
When you search for something using Google, you receive a search results page chock full of websites that might offer what you’re after. The results will include many websites Google found that are probably relevant to what you’re looking for, along with paid ads from companies who definitely offer products and services that match the words you used to search.
And, depending on your search query, you could have hundreds of pages of results options! But 94% of the people that use Google claim they only click results that are on the first page. If they don’t find what they are looking for, they usually don’t bother clicking on subsequent result pages. Instead, they typically prefer to adjust their search terms and start from scratch.
Additionally, most of people click on websites that lie in the “Golden Triangle” - the top 3 or so websites on the first results page. In fact, about 63% of the people solely utilize this top portion and never glance at the rest of the page.
This is why optimizing your website for search engines is so important these days.
When people search for something that’s relevant to them and they see your website in their search results, they are going to click and visit your page. These are not just any visitors, these are the people looking for exactly what you offer. So, of anyone, they are the most likely to be converted to customers, subscribers, etc. But if your website is not showing towards the top 3 results or so, or if it is not even on the first page, it’s almost as if your website doesn’t exist.
That’s where we come in. Reclaim Digital offers businesses in the Garden State NJ SEO services that can rescue you from being lost in the backpages of Google search results.
Have you ever wondered why some websites show up on the top and some are stuck on the bottom of the pile? A site’s position in search results is determined by what is known as Page Rank.
Every website has a ranking for a particular keywords or search terms. In 1996, two Stanford graduates noticed while analyzing academic papers that sources that contained a lot of keywords didn’t necessarily mean that they were more relevant. What mattered a more was whether those papers were cited often by other papers. They applied this concept to web search and suggested that the websites that were backlinked, that is, referred to often by other websites, were more likely to be relevant. That is how Google was born.
All the search engines today follow this model. In addition to reviewing your website’s keywords, they rank your website’s relevance on the number and quality of backlinks from the other websites. That is why the search results you see are called as Organic or Natural Listings. They are constantly changing based on what people are doing on the web.
There are two components of the NJ SEO services we provide at Reclaim Digital:
- On-site: This is where, in short, we ensure that your website incorporates the right keywords that are relevant to what your site’s about.
- Off-site: This is where we work to create backlinks to your website that originate from other sources. We want to ensure that your site is an authority on the subject of your products and services – one that is referenced often by other sites. Links to your website can be created through articles, social media, blog posts and so on. But the more influential or legitimate the website is that links back to you, the more effect that backlink is going to have on your search result ranking.
SEM
Search engine marketing (SEM) is the practice of marketing or advertising your website through search engines.
SEM may contain one or more of the following components:
- Pay Per Click Advertising: (PPC) These are ads you place for your website with a search engine like Google or Bing. You bid the amount you are willing to pay per click. The more you bid, the higher your ad will appear in the search engine results. Google Adwords has implemented an additional factor in which your ads rank based on the relevance or importance that Google places on your website. This relevance score is very difficult to manipulate. You can also use pay-per-click advertising to your advantage on your New Jersey business website, for example, you can make money with Google Adsense and other similar programs
- Pay for Inclusion: In addition to search engines like Google and Bing, numerous directories also exist on the web. These directories may be general in nature or related to a specific topic. You can get free listings in some online directories, but most directories now charge for a listing.
So, why is search engine marketing (SEM) important?
In today’s business climate, nearly all businesses are expected to have a website and most do. SEM is used as a way to get traffic to your website which in turn should ideally lead to getting new customers and adding to your business revenues. Compared to other means of marketing and advertising, SEM can be very cost effective. For example, you can implement some search engine optimization techniques on your own. Organic search rankings are free, so if you can succeed with a great Search Engine Optimization plan and move yourself up in the rankings, your traffic should increase without investing heavily on advertising, which in turn should increase your business revenues.
Similarly, pay-per-click advertising can be very inexpensive since you can set limits on how much you’ll pay-per-click and how much you’ll pay per day. Therefore, it’s fairly easy to keep your costs in line. Likewise, some web directories allow free listings and others can cost a very small amount per year. How you measure the effectiveness of your search engine marketing program depends on what your objectives were when you started. If your intent was to merely increase the number of visitors to your website, you would determine if your SEM efforts were successful by comparing your web statistics before and after you implemented SEM. In addition to that, you need to track your conversion rates as well.
In order to take full advantage of an SEO or SEM strategy, it’s important first to increase the number of visitors to your website, and then to increase the conversion rates of those visitors into paying customers.
Results You Can Track
The investment on the part of any business into their digital marketing strategy ranges drastically. Some opt for the DIY route and spend no money whatever working to increase their organic search rankings through a strong SEO (search engine optimization) effort. Others outsource their SEO strategy to copywriters and web designers, spending a few hundred dollars a month on boosting keyword and backlink rankings – costing only the time and effort of the contractors.
On the other hand, some companies spend thousands of dollars a month on a combined SEO and SEM (search engine marketing) campaign that includes paid ads combined with keyword ranking and backlinking.
What most of our New Jersey business owner clients love about these methods of digital marketing is that you can see exactly how every dime is spent. Great analytics programs also mean you can track results and direct sales from each channel of marketing effort.
How much each click costs, how many clicks you can get for a certain amount of money, how many people come to a landing page, how many people convert from that landing page, how many leads you get and you generally know how much that lead is worth to you. All of these offer a scientific approach to a marketing campaign, allowing for tweaks and adjustments as you go.
Time to turn your NJ SEO Services over to the experts at Reclaim Digital?
So, if you do business in New Jersey, consider turning your NJ SEO services over to the experts at Reclaim Digital.
We have a team of SEO/PPC experts who will work with you to make sure that your company is getting the exposure it needs.
You and your marketing team are kept in the loop throughout the entire process – from the initial keyword analysis to the monthly reporting, we will work to make sure that your goals are met.
