We live in a fast paced world with a new acronym being added to our use of language almost every other week. When it comes to digital marketing, the long list of head spinning acronyms stack up quickly. Here we will explore the most common ones, why you should know about them and how they help grow your business. Each digital marketing tool’s function is ultimately assisting in building your brand and helping your business grow.
Marketing tactics have a direct effect on your business through a diverse set of measurables; whether it is driving traffic to your business, helping nurture the traffic that is already present, or executing the sale. For the purpose of this informational resource we will discuss SEO, SEM, and PPC and how they help influence your business.
SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing or in layman’s terms, it translates to how search engines rank your performance in regards to your website. Google typically blows other search engines out of the water, capturing almost over 80% of search engine users and over 95% of mobile search engine users. Other notable search engines include platforms such as Bing and Yahoo.
Typically, your client or consumer will be finding you through a search engine. Whether they are searching “(insert your industry here) + near me” or “(insert your industry here) + (insert your city)” or they may have heard or seen marketing for your business and rather than typing in your business to the URL (uniform resource locator AKA your web address) to get directly to your website, they may search your name on Google instead.
A company’s SEM is important so that when a user is searching for you, they can find you. You’ll want to focus your efforts on ranking your website higher on these search engines so that you don’t lose a client to a potential competitor because they struggled to find your information.
You may be wondering how exactly you help rank your website higher on the search engine’s search pages and you do this by way of organic marketing and paid marketing. Organic marketing means you have optimized your website in order to rank higher. Typically, this optimization can be done through the business owner or by a marketing professional. This is how users find your website based on their search terms and you did not pay to help get them there. Paid marketing is a little more self explanatory in the sense that you are using paid ads or keywords in order to help direct consumers to your website.
This leads us directly to our next topic which is SEO. SEO translates to Search Engine Optimization. Optimizing your website helps you rank higher on search engines. Search engines use algorithms or data processing in order to “scan” your website for predetermining factors that these companies use to rank your website. Essentially, search engines are looking for expertise in your industry, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness on your subjects/industry or if you’d like another acronym to add to your repertoire us marketers refer to this as your “EAT.”
After you’ve optimized your website, you’ll want to next consider your paid advertising options or our next topic which is PPC. PPC is short for pay-per-click. What this boils down to is an advertising method in which the company pays each time the user clicks on their advertising which redirects them to their website or another platform associated with the company in order to help direct consumers to their information. What is helpful with PPC is the results are tracked and measurable. Therefore, marketers and business owners have tangible data behind their paid efforts to see what is and isn’t working or what might need to be tweaked.
