The simple answer is: SEO is what happens ON your website, while SEM Is what happen OFF your website.
What is SEM? A simplified overview.
SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing. Click any item on this numbered list to drop down to any of the items covered on this page.
- Analyzing your competitor’s SEO
- Keyword Research
- Voice-activated searches
- Getting backlinks to your website
- Google Ads Management
- Running Google Ads
_________________________________________________________-
1. Analyzing your competitor’s SEO and what keywords they use.
Competitor analysis is of vital importance to your SEM efforts. We help you understand how you rank compared to your competitors, and share important analytics to help increase your ranking over your competitors.
Through monthly video calls, we provide analysis charts showing how you’re ranking for your top keywords with Google. Of course, we also make ongoing recommendations for how to improve your rankings.
Below is an example of how a Competition Map looks – not for your industry – just as an example. We’d have one created just for you, in your industry, so you can see exactly how your current website stacks up against your competitor’s websites. That way, we know where we’re starting from, and how far we have to go.
Step 2: Apply what we’ve found to your website. This covers your website’s overall SEO. With Google’s never-ending algorithm updates, SEO is always an on-going effort. We will continue to modify your homepage for these 6 months to reflect the current best SEO practices. We believe this is critical, since your homepage is what shows up on Google’s organic search for your keywords.
This also includes technical analysis and improvements to your website fixing backend issues throughout the website, which include Page Titles, Meta Descriptions, on-page content, broken links, toxic link analysis, along with many other issues related to SEO. You’d be surprised how many things can be affected over the course of a website’s lifespan.
This covers reviewing how well the keywords are working for you, making sure they’re playing well with Google’s algorithms, and tweaking them over the next 6 months for maximum impact.
2. Keyword Research
Getting your keywords right is critical. You should never guess at what they are, because if you guess wrong, all your SEO and SEM efforts will be for nothing.
For example, if you’re a custom home builder in Dallas, and you think your keyword phrase is “Dallas custom homebuilder,” you’d have guessed wrong. That’s because people search for the word “home builder” as two words, not one.
Not let’s say you’re a Columbus web designer, and use the phrase “Columbus web design firm” as a main keyword. We’ll you would have also guessed wrong, because people search for “Columbus website design company.”
So having us conduct keyword research for the exact phrases your prospects are using to find you is critical.
3. Voice-activated searches
With voice activated search, people ask questions, like “Which Minneapolis builders specialize in kitchen renovation?” more so than just typing in 2 or 3 keywords, like “kitchen renovations”.
By conducting keyword research that includes voice searches, we can determine the questions that are being asked, which can then become the headlines for your blog posts. When the headlines of the new blogs match the questions being asked, the chances of those blogs showing up well in Google or Bing searches go way up.
As an example, our research showed there were voice searches asking the question: “Can a Columbus web designer help with search engine optimization (SEO)?” So we wrote a blog with that exact headline. Now, when someone does a voice (or Google) search asking that question, our blog shows up at the top of the page.
4. Getting backlinks to your website
Google’s original algorithms were based on how many backlinks a website has, which is still a critical ranking factor. The theory being, the more websites that link back to a website, the better information it has.
This process will get you 50 – 75 backlinks to your web- site from credible national websites. Backlinks have been one of Google’s very first algorithms, and continue to be relevant for every website.
5. Google Ads Management
Google Ads helps your website show up on their search results immediately. Over time, on-page SEO will help with your organic search results. It’s been established through research that a new website needs at least 6 months to start to rank organically on search engines. (Those are the links that show up under the ads and map.)
We design and manage your Display ads and Google Search ads. This service includes monthly video meetings that show you what we’re doing, how well things are working and what we recommend to improve these efforts.
Google Ads management includes:
- Ongoing keyword research and updating on-page content with new keywords
- Updating top keywords, after focusing on the initial keywords from our research
- Monitoring and managing organic search results vs. paid ads
- Managing Google Maps ads
6. Running Google Ads
“Conversion tracking” is extremely important and something we track carefully.
This means you know what prospects are doing on your website, who clicks where, how long they spend on your site, how many pages they visit and how many “click throughs” to your contact form.
We analyze everything and let you know the performance metrics of your site with monthly detailed reports. This means you’re paying Google for conversions (ie: phone calls, web chats or contact forms being submitted), not just clicks.
When you’re ready to get serious about your SEM, let’s talk.