gregalbuto

M Posted 5 years 5 months ago

t 9 min read

The quality and quantity of the traffic coming to your site matters. Using SEM and SEO together will drive traffic using both organic and paid strategies.

What is SEO?

SEO (or search engine optimization) is the practice of structuring your website’s pages to make it easier for search engines to crawl your site, making your pages more easily discoverable to users and search spiders, and providing unique information or helpful resources through content planning on topics that searchers are looking for. SEO is the process of improving your website to enhance the user experience and to increase quality traffic to your site. 

SEO includes both on and off-page elements. Some on-page SEO tactics include optimizing image alt text and title tags. Some off-page SEO strategies include backlinking and guest blogging. Combining all on-page and off-page SEO strategies will increase your opportunity for ranked pages.

Creating data-driven content that is fresh, unique and informative for users, not bots, will help drive ranks. Well-developed content that provides real value to readers is one of the most crucial parts of SEO. While keyword research and implementation are still a ranking factor, search engines are ranking content more predominantly based on the information provided to a user and the user experience. Search engines are better able to understand search intent therefore your content should be absolutely written for users in order to rank well

What is SEM?

What does SEM stand for? SEM stands for search engine marketing and is a paid marketing tactic to promote a site, drive traffic to your website through pay-per-click advertising (PPC) and increase page exposure in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Using PPC drives immediate visibility to your website through ads.

SEO vs SEM: The Battleground

Simply put, SEM is a paid strategy with an immediate impact while SEO is an organic strategy that shows results over time. 

Creating a paid ad that grabs the attention of a targeted audience using a great message and call to action (CTA), is only a conversion driver for the time being and for as long as you are willing to spend. 93% of digital marketers are investing in paid ads. 

Leveraging SEM generates traffic, clicks, leads, opportunities, etc. to your website immediately but is not necessarily a sustainable strategy for traffic. Once the spend on your advertisement is up, so is your SEM strategy. 

SEO, however, takes a different approach. It is believed that SEO has a much larger impact on users than SEM does. Why? Because the first organic result receives a 28.5% CTR while a paid ad only receives a 10% CTR. Organic search drives 53% of web traffic whereas paid drives 27%. While you can see traffic growth with both SEO and SEM separately, you’ll win biggest by doing both together.

SEO typically takes longer to gain traction but has better results and much more staying power. Creating content that is well-optimized without spending ad dollars is a long-term plan for ranking high in the SERPs.

Because search engines analyze your site content for expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness (E-A-T), it takes time for your pages to increase in ranks. Search engines crawl pages to find unique and high-quality content that is up to date, optimized and well-written for users. 

If your page is ranking on the first page of a search engine, this indicates search engines trust your information and your site. They are offering users your information as opposed to someone else’s. Because of this, you will see more quality traffic and leads coming to your site. 

Though your SEM campaign is targeted, sometimes you may see less quality traffic coming from your ad. This can be due to click fraud. Competitors may see your ad and click into it to inflate the number of clicks on your ad costing your company more ad spend. This is a black hat strategy to use up ad spend early on to remove your ad for the rest of the day.

Using SEO and SEM together

Can you successfully leverage SEO and SEM together? Yes! 

Is it more impactful to use SEO and SEM together? If you are doing it well and your ads complement your SEO strategy, also yes!

To successfully leverage SEO and SEM together, you need to first begin with keyword research. Performing keyword research for the pages you want to rank for is one of the most important aspects of SEO. Products like Data Cube and Instant help you perform keyword research and leverage that knowledge to create new and better-performing content.

So, what can SEO and SEM working together achieve? The most ideal result for using SEO and SEM together is that your site lands the top organic SERPs and your company is driving even more visibility with an ad, as well. Here, users have the decision to click on your ad if it is relevant to them or your organic result.

Combining insights and data for more visibility into your audience from both SEO and SEM will produce greater results. Knowing how to use SEO and SEM together is an essential strategy to the growth of your site’s traffic. SEO drives top-of-funnel leads while SEM drives bottom-funnel leads.

The Case for Developing an SEM Strategy

SEO is becoming more important and as more brands realize that more strategy is building around optimizing pages and driving ranks for the top and most competitive keywords out there. But sometimes your SEO team may find it difficult to rank for certain keywords. 

The competition for keywords that are important to you may be extremely high. If this is the case, leveraging SEM strategies can drive traffic to your site for keywords you are not able to rank for within the first few pages on the SERPs. BrightEdge Instant can help you understand and evaluate keyword competitiveness, and search intent. 

If a keyword is highly competitive, it may not be worth your team’s time to optimize pages for it. Using Instant, you can perform keyword research for keywords that are related to one another but may not have the same level of competitiveness.

Below are some additional reasons to develop an SEM strategy:

• If you’re looking to capture more user data than organic traffic offers using PPC ads, you can link to dashboards like Google Analytics to see clicks, impressions, sessions, CTR, average cost-per-click, conversions and more.
• If you’re looking to drive conversions. SEM is conversion-driven, and ads are created around a specific CTA. Leverage SEM to convert users.
• If you’re looking to boost short-term campaigns or promotions that will start and end in less time than SEO will generate traffic. SEM can expedite the sales and promotions cycle. Use SEM strategy to get your message to users ASAP about an event, a sale, a new product or service, etc. You can use SEM to drive users and traffic to your site within hours of a live ad.
• If you’re looking to drive traffic sooner while waiting for SEO to drive results. If you’re creating content based on an important keyword or topic you want to rank for, writing the post and publishing it won’t get you traffic immediately but making it the CTA of your ad will. 

Additionally, having more detailed data from ads may help you understand your audience better. You can also leverage SEM for retargeting purposes. Retargeting is when you target users that have previously clicked on your ads. If a user has taken interest in your ads before, you can drive even more brand awareness to them through retargeting.

SEM is a short-term solution to drive traffic to your site and encourage conversions instantaneously. It is most ideal to leverage SEO and SEM together to increase quality traffic to your site. But while you are working on SEO, a well-optimized SEM strategy in place will create visibility in the meantime. Once you get the hang of SEO and SEM, your combined strategies should operate well together. 

gregalbuto

M Posted 5 years 5 months ago

t 9 min read

While keywords are still an important part of SEO and ranking, search engines have evolved and are able to understand the full context of a query beyond just the keywords. Optimizing your content for semantic search can increase your chances of ranking in position 0 results like People Also Ask.

What is Semantic Search?

Semantic search is understanding a searcher or user’s search intent by understanding the language within their queries. Semantic search offers the ability to find more personalized, meaningful, and relevant results for searchers through logic.

Search engines use the context of queries, the intent behind searches, search history, location and more to offer users the best results possible for their query. Semantic search is the driving factor behind Google fully understanding a search.

The Evolution of Semantic Search

Semantic search has evolved over the last couple of years due to new innovations in artificial intelligence (AI). AI gives search engines the ability to understand natural language and the way humans speak. In late 2019, Google released a major algorithm update called BERT. BERT is a neural network-based technique for natural language processing. It can better understand the full context of your query by understanding all the words in your search including conjunctions like “are” or “but” or prepositions like “in” or “at.”

For example, if a user searches for “pictures of a wave,” Google uses natural language processing to understand “a wave” and that the user is looking for a water wave. If the user searches for “pictures of waving” Google is able to understand “waving” as a verb and offers results for people waving. Here, Google uses semantic search to understand the relationship between words to offer results. See the following images for context. 

It is imperative to note that Google penalizes pages and URLs for optimizing for search spiders rather than users, hence the creation of BERT. Search engines want to generate results for users that are informative and relevant to their searches.

Google’s algorithms are all designed with the goal of better understanding exactly what a user is searching to find. Google continues to progress their algo updates to drive new capabilities so search engine results pages – or SERPs – are as accurate as possible for the individual searcher. Using semantic search, Google has been able to form a deeper understanding of user intent. 

To better understand user and customer intent data to benchmark your marketing performance for specific categories, you can leverage Market Insights.

Understanding Semantic SEO

Semantic SEO is the process of optimizing content for users by understanding their full search intent. Before optimizing for a keyword, first understand what exactly the user is asking or searching for. From there, you need to ask yourself, what follow up questions will the user ask? Here, think of People Also Ask (PAA) and what these rich results offer users. Not only are they able to find the answers to their original query, but they are also able to dive deeper without leaving the SERP.

Search engines are more likely to provide results for pages that answer many of the questions a searcher is asking, rather than just one. Therefore, you will want to create content that delivers plenty of targeted information to searchers. One way to help you do this is to conduct a search on a query that you want to rank for. Look at the PAA results that appear and answer those questions within your content.

For example, if a user were to search “how to start a garden” they may also want to know what month to start a garden, how much it costs to start a garden, which tools they need to start, etc. Below you can see the PAA results for “how to start a garden” include inquiries about which month to start a garden and the cost of it. You should create content around both questions to practice semantic SEO and maximize your opportunity to rank.

Search engines are only going to become more intelligent about search intent and to rank well, it is essential that content also anticipates what the searcher is looking to find beyond the face value of the search query. Keep semantic search and semantic SEO in mind while creating content for your site in the future. 

gregalbuto

M Posted 5 years 5 months ago

t 9 min read

If you’re a digital marketer and landed on this page, it’s likely because you’re looking to understand SEO. Last year, especially due to the global pandemic, consumers shifted to more online purchasing and B2B companies shifted their marketing strategies to target online users. 

According to Statista, in 2019, worldwide ecommerce sales were at $3.35 trillion and in 2020, this rose to a record high of $4.28 trillion. Because of this rapid growth in online sales, it is now more critical than ever to have a well-optimized digital footprint. 

What is SEO?

SEO, or search engine optimization, is about getting your product, service or message to searches. In practical terms, SEO is the on-going process of improving your website to increase relevancy and drive traffic through organic search engine results. When a user enters a query into a search engine, the results are displayed on a search engine results page, also called a SERP. A SERP commonly includes paid advertisements and organic results. The organic results are those that can be influenced by SEO.

The core elements of SEO 

There are many elements that influence organic ranking, and it can be daunting to know where to start. The easiest place to have the most impact would be with on-page and off-page SEO elements. For this post, we're going to dive into on-page SEO 101. Let’s look at a few that we suggest most beginners focus on. The common on-page SEO elements most beginners optimize include the following:

• Keywords
• Title tags
• Heading tags
• Image and Video alt text
• Meta description
• Internal links
• Topic relevance

Keywords. The heart and soul of SEO is keywords. Keywords are a way to distill topics down to focused queries used on search engines to generate results. Identifying which keywords are most relevant to your pages can be done through a process called keyword research. Using a research tool like BrightEdge Data Cube, you can find keyword search volumes, current ranks, search trends, competitiveness for keywords, related keywords and more. 

Search trends are shifts in searches for specific keywords or groups of keywords. For example, more people searched for keywords revolving around leisure apparel when COVID-19 happened, and the country went into lockdown.

Search volume is a representation of how many searches a keyword receives during a period of time. This is usually collected monthly. You can leverage search trends and search volumes to strategize for new content. 

Keyword competition refers to the quantity of SEOs or digital marketers hoping to rank for a specific keyword. Understanding the competitiveness of a keyword is a valuable to your SEO strategy in order to avoid wasting time and resources on keywords you won’t have an opportunity to rank for. If you optimize for a keyword with “high” competitiveness, you’ll have less of a chance of ranking high in the SERPs as many brands are working to rank for the same keyword. You’ll want to find keywords with “low” competition in order to maximize your rank opportunities.

Below is an example of keyword research using Data Cube.

Title tags. Your title tag appears in the SERPs, is a title of a page appearing in a browser window or tab and tells both readers and search engine spiders what the page is about. You’ll want to leverage a keyword in your title tag for a better chance at ranking high in the SERPs. Title tags should be under 65 characters. 

Below is an example of an organic SERP. The title tag for the first search result on the SERP is “What is SEO? A Guide to Site Optimization | BrightEdge.”

Heading tags. Heading tags are used to indicate to readers and search engines what each section of your page’s content is about. There are multiple heading tag types, ranging from H1 to H6 and each is evaluated in a descending priority order. A basic approach would be to organize your content under an H1 and a few H2s used whenever the content gets more specific or differs from the main purpose of the page. The keywords used in heading tags should go from most important to least important. Because you can optimize a page for multiple keywords, you’ll want to choose the ones you want to rank for with larger search volumes for H1, H2 and H3. Keep headers to a maximum of 70 characters.

Below is an example of an H1 and H2. The H1 is “Use widgets on your iPhone and iPod touch” and the H2 is “Add widgets to your Home Screen.”

Alt text for images and videos. Alt text is the descriptor of an image or video that appears for the visually impaired. Search engines will also crawl and index this information, providing another element to optimize for relevance. The text should be under 100 characters and specific and descriptive enough for those who are visually impaired to understand an image using screen reading technology. 

Below is an example of optimized image alt text. The image alt text is “Lawyer SEO keywords to excel with on your law firm’s site – BrightEdge.”

Meta description. A meta description’s length should not exceed 155 characters and should explain to a user what a page is about. The meta description will appear in the SERPs and if you don’t choose one, search engines will populate one for you based on the text of your page. To avoid this, write your own and leverage one to two keywords in your description. While a meta description is not a ranking factor for SEO, it can help attract the right audience to your pages.

Below is an example of a meta description.

Internal linking. There are several benefits to connecting your pages to each other on your site. One benefit is driving traffic to a deeper page. Another is influencing longer session durations and lower bounce rates which tells search engines that users are interested in your content. 

While internal linking has its benefits, there are a few areas to be aware of. Avoid linking just for the sake of adding a link and try to keep your internal linking per page to a minimum. Essentially, don’t overdo it.

Below is an example of internal linking. The blue text is where internal links are placed.

You’re now armed with an overview of SEO! Next, consider creating a page optimization process that works for you. Be sure to keep track of the keywords you’re optimizing and all your ongoing SEO efforts. If you see an increase in rank, determine what SEO elements work for that page and whether they make sense for each of your site pages. You can leverage a robust SEO platform like BrightEdge to track keyword, SEO efforts, ranks and more. 

Remember that SEO is an iterative process and that search engines are constantly evaluating which pages are the best for a given search query. If you don’t immediately see an increase in ranking, go back and review these elements to see what further improvements can be made. Good luck!