Just What You've Been Looking For! SEO & SEM Tips

March 8, 2016

We live in a world that is more digitally connected than ever.  This should make it easier for consumers to find what they’re looking for, right? Not necessarily. How often do you look past the first page of the Google search results? Probably only if you’re really desperate.  This highlights the importance of search engine optimization and ensuring that a website ranks as high as possible on the search engine results page. 

The creative side of marketing is meaningless if your consumers can’t find your content.  Don’t let all your research and carefully thought out copy go to waste.  Search engine optimization is here to help.  It may not seem as exciting as the copywriting side of the campaign process but it’s just as important.

We live in a world that is more digitally connected than ever.  This should make it easier for consumers to find what they’re looking for, right? Not necessarily. How often do you look past the first page of the Google search results? Probably only if you’re really desperate.  This highlights the importance of search engine optimization and ensuring that a website ranks as high as possible on the search engine results page.  The creative side of marketing is meaningless if your consumers can’t find your content.  Don’t let all your research and carefully thought out copy go to waste.  Search engine optimization is here to help.  It may not seem as exciting as the copywriting side of the campaign process but it’s just as important.

To teach the basics Google has published an SEO starter guide. (Let’s be honest, when was the last time you used Bing anyway?) Search engine marketing comes in two forms, paid search and organic search.

The search result with the yellow “Ad” icon shows up first because the company paid to ensure that their website is found when “moz” is searched.  Every time that someone navigates to their website they have to pay, this is known as pay-per-click.  If you were to navigate to Moz’s website via the second link this is referred to as organic search, and does not cost the company. 

 I recommend only clicking on the ad results if you aren’t fond of the brand and want a bit of satisfaction knowing that your traffic cost them.   Paid search is not cheap and average CPC costs have been increasing since 2012.  This trend shows how important it is for a page to be ranked as high on a search engine results page as possible without paying. 

The search result with the yellow “Ad” icon shows up first because the company paid to ensure that their website is found when “moz” is searched.  Every time that someone navigates to their website they have to pay, this is known as pay-per-click.  If you were to navigate to Moz’s website via the second link this is referred to as organic search, and does not cost the company.  I recommend only clicking on the ad results if you aren’t fond of the brand and want a bit of satisfaction knowing that your traffic cost them.   Paid search is not cheap and average CPC costs have been increasing since 2012.  This trend shows how important it is for a page to be ranked as high on a search engine results page as possible without paying. 

This is where search engine optimization comes in.  For more information on Google click through rates check out this interesting study which claims that “on average, 71.33% of searches result in a page one organic click. Google offers great advice about description Meta tags, URL structures, and XML Sitemaps in their starter guide, but some people without coding experience might start to panic here.  If those terms sound confusing or overwhelming don’t worry, there are plenty of SaaS options that make SEO simple.  A huge tool for search marketers is Moz. Moz offers software to help simplify SEO and they have over 35,000 customers to date. Not only do they provide software services but they are also a community of sorts.  Moz community members can post blogs to share advice and insight with other search marketers.  The founder and former CEO, Rand Fishkin, has his own blog featured too.  Fishkin notably has a reputation for yellow sneakers, even at fancy shmancy marketing conventions around the world.  He says that this is to differentiate himself from everyone else in the field, he claims those in tech aren’t really good with names.   A yellow symbol used to stand out, that sounds pretty familiar. 

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