Blog / SEO & SEM | Tools & Tricks for Clicks

Many first-time website owners expect their new site to immediately show up at the top of Google search results for their industry. But, just having a website isn’t enough to ensure it gets found when people search for your business category on Google and other search engines. At Field Group, we use two tools to help boost a website’s search appearance: SEO and SEM.

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SEO - Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) consists of a variety of methods to increase your website’s organic ranking (organic, in this case, means “free”). There are two pieces to SEO:

• On-site optimization
• Off-site optimization

On-site optimization refers to the content on your website: text, images, videos, etc. When people search for information online, a search engines’ goal is to provide users the best information possible. If you want your website to show up in search results, you must include content on your page that answers people’s common search questions. Most of the time, this content will be posted on your site in the form of blogs or articles.

In addition to the visible content on your website, there’s also invisible content on your site called metadata. This data tells search engines what your website is about, and it helps encourage people to click on your site when it shows up in search results.

Every site Field Group develops includes content (visible content and metadata) optimized for search engines. However, SEO is an ongoing task that requires frequent content creation to keep your site updated with searchable information.

SEM - Search Engine Marketing

Search engines like Google and Bing are happy to sell the spots at the top of their results pages. Buying these ads is called SEM or Search Engine Marketing. These ads consist of text (no images), and they look just like other search results.

Buying ads on search engines is the quickest and easiest way to get your website to rank higher in search results. You create text that says exactly what you want, and those ads will appear when people search for the keywords you selected. If someone clicks on your ad, you pay the search engine a small amount of money.

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So, which is “better”?

While SEM is a quick and easy way to increase your website’s search ranking, it relies on you constantly paying for ads to get results—if you stop paying, you stop seeing results. On the other hand, SEO offers results from your efforts over time, even if you stop doing the active work.

Give Field Group a call for help with both SEM and SEO! We’ll audit your website, give SEO recommendations, and develop an SEM plan to help your target audience find you online.