Web design agencies like Pebble produce new websites for a lot of businesses, if you are lucky enough to work in our industry you may have come across clients, when, once you have launched their new website, they will give you a call a few days later, maybe a week or a month and ask you why they are not at the top of Google yet.
In the industry we know why this is. We don't get frustrated by these calls but we appreciate that a client has paid good money to have a professional website built and nearly always assume that a page 1 position in google or bing is included in the cost. Even though we explained from the start.
It is then we talk about the options open to them. Large companies budget for online marketing, including, text ads, image ads, advertising networks etc etc, more often than not, small companies think online marketing is a website, and that is all.
Let us explain a little about the difference between SEO and SEM.
Search Engine Optimisiation (SEO)
Search engine optimisation, or what most people call it, SEO involves building new websites for people or companies, changing existing websites that are already on the world wide web so that they rank highly in a search engine's organic listings when users search on terms that are related to the site's content.
Summary:
SEO can be a long game, whether your website makes it even to the top 100 pages of Google is not guaranteed. Page Rank, Backlinks, Quality Content all makes a big difference in SEO.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Search Engine Marketing is the process of promoting and marketing a website through paid listings (advertisements) on search engines such as Google or Bing.
In order to create an ad for a given search engine, you need to create an account with the advertising product or branch of that search engine. For Google, this product is AdWords. After creating an account, you then create your ad and enter a list of user search queries -- called "keywords" -- that can trigger your ad to be shown.
Ads on most search engines operate on a pay-per-click (PPC) model, meaning that you pay only when a user clicks your ad, and not for the ad impression (the instance in which the ad appears on the page). The other common pricing model in online advertising is cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM), in which you pay per impression, not for any clicks on your ad.
Site owners often choose to advertise their site instead of, or in addition to, optimising their site for placement in the organic search results. Although it's necessary to pay for the clicks your ads receive, advertising allows you to be proactive about when and where a listing for your site appears. Creating an AdWords account takes minutes, and ads can run almost immediately in response to keywords that you choose.
Summary:
Your website can be Page 1 overnight and you could be converting visitors to customers almost immediately, the downside is, it costs money and depending on your industry, it could cost you thousands of pounds every month. we have heard stories of individuals becming addicted to Search Engine Marketing schemes such as Google Adwords, so a word of caution to stick to your budget.