Imagine you’re in a ring having a WWE wrestling match with one of your rivals. During your bout, 2 dudes popped out from under the ring and darted in. They helped you hold your rival back, preventing and defending all his moves, giving you the upper hand. You easily perform your finishing move and claimed victory.
Some may say that is cheating, but to me, that’s just making full use of your resources to your advantage. Now take the wrestling match as your search engine marketing (SEM) strategy, your rival as your competitor, the 2 dudes under the ring as pay per click (PPC) and analytics while you are search engine optimisation (SEO). In order to give your competition a good and easy whooping, you should have an SEM strategy that combines the 3 (SEO, PPC & Analytics). Here is why;
SEO
Good SEO enables your website to have a higher ranking in the search engine results page. With a higher ranking, your website will receive higher traffic as seen in the graph above by Chitika Insights. It is also the most important aspect of the 3, it sets the foundation for the rest. All websites have some form of SEO, it is just whether it is done well or not. SEO makes your website accessible and is seen by search engines. Otherwise, you won’t even be shown on the results page and nobody will know you and visit your website. This also ensures that your website is relevant to what users are looking for. By being relevant, you will have a higher quality score, resulting in better bids for your PPC campaigns. You can improve your SEO by following this guide by Moz.
Pay Per Click
PPC would be the cherry on top for your SEM strategy. Extend your accessibility, increase impression and click-through rates by running PPC ads. To compete with your competitors with only SEO is possible but it would require a lot of work. To get a bit of a boost ahead of them, you could use PPC ads. It will require lesser effort (but more money) to reach the top of search engine search results page. Since the PPC ad bidding is determined by a combination of budget and relevance score, you can keep the cost low by ensuring your website and ad copy has a high relevance score. Refer to this guide by Hubspot to run better PPC campaigns on Google.
“You cannot manage what you cannot measure”
Peter Drucker, the father of management
Analytics
Analytics is where you measure all the steps and actions in your SEM strategy. This will let you know how well and why the actions that you have taken for your SEO and PPC did well or not. It’s like how you would taste your cooking and make an adjustment by adding more salt and pepper to get the result you were looking for. Apart from being able to make adjustments, you would be able to identify patterns, duplicate them and determine the appropriate budget for your PPC campaigns.
There are tons of free analytics tool on the internet, with the most popular analytics tool would be the famous Google Analytics. However, I have discovered another analytics tool that is as powerful (or more powerful) than Google’s, Yandex Metrica. One of the most useful features would be its ability to record the website visitor’s session.
In short, create a better SEM strategy by combining SEO, PPC and Analytics. Create a good foundation with SEO, increase reach and CTR with PPC and tweak them with Analytics. At the end of the day if two is better than one, wouldn’t three be the best?
Tell me your favourite SEM tool that you’ve used in the comments below.
Written by: Azrin Hamdan
Nice and interesting blog to read. I love the way how you manipulate the topics into real life such as wwe. For me I think that SEO is the most important part of SEM as it allows companies to have better recognition on the search engine and that will benefits the company by having new customers
Yes, SEO is essential for SEM, it sets the foundation. But it should also be supplemented with Analytics. Without analytics, a company would not be able to measure what and why they are doing well or badly. If a company knows why their SEO strategy is doing badly, they can take appropriate actions to correct it.
It is interesting blog that talks about SEO, SEM and Analytics. I would say that firms or company should look into how to make use of SEO SEM and analytics in order to help to create better presence in the online platforms. It also serve as an competitive advantage to the company to make better online presence so that users or customer are aware that they are there. Analytics on the other hand will help them to measure their results to know what are their strength and weaknesses and identify which part of SEM or SEO to improve.
You can check out my blog as well on firms should adopt SEO or SEM or both on my blog post here: https://wongzhixiandigitalmktg.wordpress.com/
Hey Azrin! It was great reading your post and it’s a new experience that you added a tool (Google Analytics) that acts like an example to fully utilise SEM.
Both SEO and PPC offers solution to creating an online presence, and Analytics is where you can further tweak the strategies implemented and do better with the next step.
Regarding the use of the SEM and Analytics altogether, I would say it depends on the size and strength of the businesses. If we’re talking about a startup business, It’s best to stick with SEO first and slowly implement PPC to gain Internet presence in a short period of time. There’s no need for Analytics because it requires a base of skills to play with it. Using both SEO and PPC should be already time and cost consuming, therefore it really depends on the business.
Hey Jack, thank you for commenting.
I disagree that only bigger and strong businesses can implement Analytics. Small businesses (like startups) can and should make use of it. Google has made their analytics tool free and easy to use. They even include a short introductory course on how to use it, which takes only a couple of hours. Hence budget and ability should not be an issue for any business to make use of analytics. Also, I think what you imagine when I mention analytics is the complex machine learning and AI version. However, here I’m referring to collecting data, measuring it, analysing and understanding it, which is not as complex as machine learning and AI. Google analytics does 90% of the job, you only need to analyse and understand what the data means, which anyone can do but a few can do well.
Therefore, it would be time and cost consuming if businesses try to apply machine learning and that is not suited for every business. However, the most basic level of analytics should be accessible and be implemented by all businesses.
Your blog post is really interesting, this blog give the other view of SEM also SEO. In my opinion, the SEO or SEM nowadays is very effective weapon of marketer to “hit” their target audience by most effective way which have high interactive. The SEO also SEM offer for marketer the other tool to collect customer data which have them improve product or marketing campaign. However, SEO and SEM increase the risk in personal data privacy that problem same at the risk of IoT. I believes in future with the increase of internet security that problem will be solve and SEO or SEM it the marketing tool of future.
Thank you for the compliments. Yes, SEM (especially PPC) when done well will make someone feel like their personal data and privacy have been breached. It will make them feel like they are being stalked with the pin-point accuracy of the ads. As you said, more security measures will be in place to protect internet users. This will make SEM more interesting as there will be more rules and regulations to comply with.
Hey Azrin, I liked the analogy you used of wrestlers.
Marketers are indeed strongest with the three wrestlers; PPC, Analytics and SEO working together.
I do feel that PPC can be seen as the constraint of the combo though.
I hope that with this course, we are all well-equipped with knowledge to win in this wrestling match.
Awesome analogy of PPC, Analytics and SEO. Do you think that marketers would have a more seamless and cheaper experience if they used the tools provided by Google since they are under one brand where data can be moved around more easily?
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