To grow your business, you’re likely considering using digital marketing. It’s hard to avoid coming across the acronyms SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and SEA (Search Engine Advertising). To help you better understand them, we’ve defined these terms in our marketing glossary.
However, these SEO techniques are essential to developing a digital marketing strategy. It is therefore important for us to revisit these principles. We would like to explain them in more detail to help you implement them more effectively.
What is the goal of SEO and SEA?
Consumer behavior is constantly evolving, and the coronavirus crisis is only driving consumers further toward digital platforms. It is therefore essential to have a strong presence on search engines in order to be visible.
SEO and SEA will help you establish your online presence. You’ll be able to generate high-quality traffic and increase awareness of your website and your brand. These are powerful acquisition techniques that deserve your attention.
SEO: The Cornerstone of Your Digital Strategy
Before you even consider spending your budget on paid search engine advertising, we believe it’s important to focus your efforts on improving the quality of your website.
In practical terms, this means you’ll be working on your SEO. To put it simply, you’ll be making search engines want to automatically suggest your website to users.
Creating blog posts
There are several elements involved in developing your SEO strategy. The one we’d particularly like to draw your attention to is content creation. Setting up a blog is a good way to go about it.
Choice of Keywords
How do you decide which blog posts to write? First and foremost, you should think about the value you can provide to your prospects and customers. You’ll therefore want to focus on the information your audience is looking for so you can provide them with value.
Of course, there are various techniques and tools to help you with this. However, to keep it very simple, focus on the questions you’re regularly asked during appointments or in your showrooms. That’s an excellent starting point.
We also recommend that you focus on the right keywords —that is, the ones your customers actually use. By incorporating this specific vocabulary into your content, search engines will be able to make the connection between what people are searching for and the text you’ve written.
Carefully fill out the fields for the title tag and meta description. Also, provide a description that reflects your brand and choose a URL that specifies the topic covered in your article. These fields are very important because they are read and used by search engines.
Benefits of SEO
The content you create has a lasting impact. Once it's written, it will be available to your audience for as long as you want to keep it available.
Creating content takes time and effort, but other than that, it’s free. You don’t have to spend any money to improve your SEO.
SEA: A Valuable Partner for Immediate Visibility
Once you’ve spent some time making your website appealing, you can start considering investing a certain amount in paid advertising. This makes perfect sense, since you’ll be driving visitors who are interested in your business to your website. Your website needs to welcome them properly to build their trust and reassure them that you’re the right service provider to choose.
There are several ways to advertise on search engines. Since Google is the most widely used search engine in Belgium, start with that one. It provides a tool that allows you to manage your various campaigns: Google Ads (formerly Google AdWords).
Keyword Search
The first step in an SEA campaign is identifying the keywords you want to rank for. These are the keywords that internet users type into search engines to find your website. It’s really important to give this some thought. Your SEO efforts will certainly help you with this.
Different Types of Ads
Google offers several ways to promote your business, such as search ads, display ads, shopping ads, and video ads. To get started, creating a text ad (or Search campaign) is a good place to begin. It will allow you to appear at the top of search results.
Create a budget
Unlike SEO, SEA is a paid service. You’ll therefore need to set a total budget for your ad campaign over a specific time period, as well as a daily budget for the campaign.
Set a goal
When you launch a paid campaign, you’ll want to achieve a specific goal, such as introducing a new product or service. Setting your goal will help determine your landing page and allow you to evaluate the success of your campaign.
Write Your Ad
Now is the time to put pen to paper and write the copy that will convince online users to click on your ad rather than your competitor’s. Take the time to weigh every word and think about how you’ll capture the user’s attention.
Benefits of SEA
Unlike SEO, SEA delivers immediate results, provided you have a sufficient budget. The results will depend on the level of competition for the keywords you've selected.
Creating an ad takes less time than creating content. Within 48 hours, your ad can go live and start driving traffic to your website.
You have access to results that allow you to manage and adjust your campaigns to optimize your conversion rates.
In conclusion, as you can see, these SEO techniques complement each other when it comes to acquiring new customers. Implementing a solid SEO strategy will allow you to build brand awareness without having to pay for clicks. It’s a strategy that’s very cost-effective in the long run. On the other hand, an SEA strategy will allow you to achieve specific goals in a shorter amount of time.