“Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning.”
– Benjamin Franklin
If you’ve ever had the merest thought of implementing online marketing strategies for your business or done recent research to this effect, you’ve probably run across the acronyms “SEO” and “SEM.” Experienced web advertisers toss these terms around frequently. Both are actually complex, nuanced concepts packed into just three letters. “SEO” stands for “Search Engine Optimization,” and the very similar “SEM” stands for “Search Engine Marketing.” While valid and even vital strategies in the modern world, marketers often mishandle them. Instead of jumping wildly from one trend to the next or engaging in costly competition for top-ranked terms, Concentric Management takes an intelligent, customized approach to this tactic. As it turns out, the best analogy for smart SEO and SEM is actually farming. Learn why below.
SEO and SEM Simplified
Whether you’re looking for a good café nearby, settling a movie trivia debate with a friend, trying to figure out which computer to buy, or deciding which business to patronize, you probably do the same thing: you type your question into an all-knowing search engine. Platforms such as Google are like modern-day oracles, packed with useful information available at your fingertips. For this reason, per Alexa ratings, Google is the number one most visited site in the world.
Harnessing the massive power of these platforms for marketing purposes is the basis of SEO and SEM. If people looking for what they need discovered your company’s website when they searched, you’d probably see a steady stream of pre-qualified leads flowing through your doors. It sounds easy enough, right? Make it so that your company site appears when people search for your products, and—bippity boppity boo!—modern marketing magic.
While the idea of SEO and SEM is very simple, the processes behind these strategies are just the opposite. Google and other search engines are primarily concerned with delivering value to their users. They work because you get what you want when you search, and you believe the results. Search engines engender this trust by devising ever more accurate algorithms to determine which sites are the best responses to specific keywords. For example, when you search for “best laptops for small business owners,” the pages that come up meet Google’s criteria for useful sites in response to this particular query.
SEO and SEM essentially entail learning about these operations and optimizing them for your site’s visibility. Our team knows what makes Google tick and devise tactics accordingly. In the true spirit of SEO and SEM, we primarily focus on helping you rise to the top by making your website worthwhile for users.
A Few Key Numbers
One of the pitfalls of SEO and SEM is that there is just so much data concerning these subjects out there. While this vast wealth of knowledge can be valuable for discerning experts, it is a jumbled, confusing mass for the average business owner. At Concentric Management, we help our clients highlight and leverage what is important without getting mired down in the rest. There are millions of statistics we could provide on SEO and SEM, but these are a few key numbers that demonstrate its power:
- Search Engine Land reports on a study by Google: “50 percent of consumers who conducted a local search on their smartphone visited a store within a day, and 34 percent who searched on computer/tablet did the same.” Clearly, this corroborates the direct link between SEO/SEM and traffic for your company.
- “93 percent of online experiences begin with a search engine” and “a study by Outbrain shows that search is the #1 driver of traffic to content sites” according to Search Engine Journal. You can reach a wide swatch of current and potential customers by improving your search engine presence.
- Business 2 Community’s set of infographics on this topic indicate: “87 percent of smartphone owners use a search engine at least once a day,” and “60 percent of American adults smartphones and tablets to search for local product and service information.” SEO and SEM are important tools to drive consumers into local businesses.
You Reap What You SEO
In the opening paragraph, we made the bold claim that the best analogy for SEO and SEM is farming. You may be wondering what agriculture possibly has to do with these algorithms, but hear us out. Farming, as a concept, is simple—plant seeds, grow them, pluck them, and profit! However, as we all know, the action of successful farming is quite complex. There are myriad factors involved and most effective farmers combine a variety of techniques to yield great crops.
Farming also takes time. No one expects to scatter a few pumpkin seeds in the yard and wake up the next morning to a row of big orange squash. The same applies to SEO and SEM. No matter how much research you do, how much money you invest, or how clever your approach is, it’s nearly impossible build a website and have it rank in the number one spot overnight. Given time and wise planning, however, you can enjoy a cornucopia of customers.
At Concentric Management, we implement SEO and SEM to help you grow your brand online and build a lasting search engine presence that will yield season after season.
Cultivate Your SEO and SEM with Concentric Management
SEO and SEM are integral elements of our growth-based strategies for businesses. Contact Concentric Management today to learn more about these services.