Shuffle - SEO UK

SEM means search engine marketing, and as such, many argue that it actually includes SEO (search engine optimisation).

The idea is that SEM includes everything you can do to promote and market your Website in search engines. This includes paid inclusion in search engine directories (Yahoo, for example, mixes paid inclusion with organic results from web crawling), traditional advertising, where you advertise on the search engine results pages and pay for page views, and pay-per-click advertising (PPC), where you only pay if someone clicked on your ad. Google Adsense, for example, is a PPC ad network.

The best thing about SEM is the immediacy of its results, although this largely depends on your budget. Google Adsense, for example, can become quite costly for advertisers, especially if you’re trying to target highly competitive keywords. When we say “costly,” we mean both in terms of your monthly advertising budget, and in terms of the time you, an employee or a consultant will need to spend monitoring and fine-tuning the ads.

Having said that, if you are willing to spend, and have the budget for it, SEM brings your site immediate traffic. Now the question is, after you’ve spent all that money advertising your site, how well is that traffic going to convert?

Needless to say, before you even think about starting an SEM campaign, you need to make sure that your site is ready for the traffic that campaign will send you. Here at SEO UK we specialise in building high quality, user-friendly Websites and we can’t stress enough the importance of having such a site. The last thing you want is to pay for clicks that brings people to your Website, only to have them immediately bounce off because they can’t find what they were looking for.

Your Website needs to have a clean design, be uncluttered and inviting. It needs to load fast, and above all, you need to make sure that your landing pages – the pages people land on after clicking on a PPC ad – are VERY easy to navigate and include a clear call for action.

Paying for an SEM campaign that send visitors to a cluttered, poorly designed site is like throwing money in the trash.

Which brings us to SEO. Unlike SEM, which does nothing on your site and just places an ad that leads to your site (unless of course you design specific landing pages for each ad, which ideally you should be doing), SEO is all about making the site itself better.

SEO takes a long hard look at your site and improves it. As part of preparing your site and making sure it is user-friendly, you will no doubt hire as SEO Company. SEO services include many aspects, but the most important aspect for our current discussion is that a good SEO Company, UK or international, will make sure that your site is not just search engine friendly, but also user-friendly. For example, Google recently announced that it is now considering a site’s speed in its ranking system. A good SEO company will make sure that your site loads reasonably fast, and this will also help with conversion and stickiness.

In fact, if you start with SEO – as you should – and hold off on SEM, in many cases you will find that you don’t need SEM at all, because while SEO results take several months to become apparent, once they do become apparent, they are very powerful – especially because users tend to trust organic search results more than they trust paid advertising.