What is SERP, SEM & SEO?

Search Engine Optimization for All Your Content Marketing Needs

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the most commonly used form of marketing for online business visibility and marketing. It is the one that the majority of webmasters, content writers and eMarketers know and understand. At the same time, it is one that goes through many changes on a yearly—sometimes monthly basis.

Google has certainly changed the goal posts when it comes to search engine visibility. The focus is on quality now, rather than gaming the system. Engaging, high quality content will get you much further, and it is important to add keyword phrases in naturally.

What is SEO exactly? It’s the process of making websites and pages easier to find in search results. The use of links, keyword phrases and social media posts all help to build a site’s ranking in the search results and thus market the site more efficiently.

Search Engine Marketing Using Different Technology

Search engine marketing (SEM) can start out by using SEO, but it goes further in improving search engine visibility. It uses all the different technologies available through the various search engine companies, including through paid ads. These ads can be on the search engines themselves or on other web and social media sites. The aim is to attract a larger number of people.

One of the popular methods is through sponsored posts and links. You may see companies’ promotions through sponsored posts on your Facebook newsfeed or see the sponsored results at the top of your Google search results. These are all forms of search engine marketing.

While SEO helps to get better organic results in the search engines, SEM helps to improve the visibility across the whole of the Internet. The latter helps to draw more attention.

SEO can be free, but you will have to pay for SEM. Most people pay for clicks, and can often set a daily budget. It is important to revisit the budget and determine the success rate of this regularly by reviewing your website’s analytic reports.

Search Engine Results Page to See Where You Rank

The search engine results page (SERP) is another element entirely. This isn’t exactly something that you can do to help improve your online or search engine visibility. Instead, you see how visible you are based on a search query or term you put in the search box. In short, it is the list of results that a search engine will return and your site’s current position within it.

In the majority of cases, you will see the title of the page and a short description underneath. These give the searchers enough insight to help them determine if a link is going to be useful for them. However, you may also find images and other media returned in the searches if you do a different types of search.

The SERP listings use both search engine optimization and search engine marketing to determine the order the results are shown in. Those that are deemed more relevant will be listed just underneath the initial sponsored links.

The more you know about eMarketing and online business visibility, the more successful you can be with your ranking. It is important to use all the different elements of search engine visibility together, as they all offer different things. Start by looking at your SERP listing. From there, you can do more SEO or SEM to help improve the positioning of your results. SEO is the one that the majority of people start out with because it is cheaper, but that doesn’t mean sponsored listings and paid ads should be overlooked. They all certainly have their benefits.

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