Understanding SEO and SEM: The Essentials [Interview]

A Beginner’s Guide to search engine marketing with Amy Broadfoot

What is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)?

Holly: We’re here to talk about SEO & SEM, but I would love if could we just start with some of the basics for people who might consider themselves search marketing dummies…

So, for example, what does SEO stand for? What does it mean?

Amy: Yeah, good question. It stands for Search Engine Optimisation. It's the practice of going through your website and optimising it so search engines can crawl it and understand it and index it, but also anything that you do for better empathy for your customer, more information on your website, then by default you are naturally optimising for SEO as well.

So, it's the practice of doing things, so you get more traffic coming through from Google search results essentially.

SEO versus SEM and which is right for you

Holly: What is the difference between SEO and SEM? Because they’re acronyms which are thrown around a lot.

Amy: Yeah, I am going to nerd out. I hear a lot of Search people talking about this and getting aggravated about this term. But SEM stands for search engine marketing, and that can be inclusive of all search marketing tactics, and that can be your organic (SEO, which we just mentioned) as well as what's called PPC (price per click) advertising, your Adwords, your ads that go on.

And so, if you really want to nerd out and be specific SEM covers both of those terms, but we typically use it to mean PPC (Adwords). Sometimes people will say, ‘hey I want to do some SEM’, and we’re like ‘so SEO as well, or do you mean PPC?’. 

Holly: OK, thank you for clarifying that, because I think I have been using that term wrong (laughs). 

And out of those two tactics, SEO and PPC, what would you usually recommend a business invests in first if they’re just starting to look at search. And why?

Amy: If you're a new business or a start-up with a really lean marketing budget you probably want to look at Ad words (PPC) and probably a little bit of retargeting, particularly social media retargeting, nurturing that first interaction as well as that more consistent relationship to build to come back to your website. And what you want to do is start generating income that you can reinvest it into other marketing practises.

With any PPC spend, if there is a little bit of budget to play with, I also recommend—here's more acronyms— some CRO (Conversion rate optimisation testing). PPC or SEO might bring the traffic to the website, but if your website isn’t designed in a really good user-friendly experience, you’re potentially losing sales.

And CRO (conversion rate optimisation) is the practice of testing the website and designing it to increase those conversions. So, you might be spending $1000 a month on Adwords (advertising), and you might be getting $2000 worth of sales, and then you do some CRO, and you spend $1000 still, but you get $3000 worth of sales. So, it really helps to extract the most out of that advertising spend and budget.

Holly: So, it's basically looking at the traffic that comes in and then optimising that traffic, so you're converting.

Amy: That’s the path of least resistance, how do we make it as easy for people as possible to handover money, essentially.

And then if you have a little more money, or once those sales are starting to generate and you have a bit more of a marketing budget, that’s when you would invest in SEO. But SEO typically, you need at least three months if not six months to really start to see an impact of that.

What's really great about that is once do you set it up, you've got this passive, always-on, traffic coming to your website. And that might make the difference between, you might not need to write so many newsletters, or you don't need to go that networking event, or you don’t need to spend as much money on paid advertising. And so, you can really allow yourself to be a bit more of a lazy marketer once you've got your SEO really set up. You can kind of turn off everything else if it's working, although I don't recommend turning everything off, it allows you to chill out a bit.

Holly: Amazing, I love the idea of that.

What to look for in a good SEO company 

Holly: So, we've talked about the best places to spend money. If I’m a small business and I’m looking at search agencies, what should I be looking for? What should I look for in a good search company, a good SEO company?

Amy: The first warning bell that I would see, which is unfortunately very typical in SEO companies, is when they start to go "We'll rank you for ten keywords" or "We'll rank you for 100 keywords" per month. It's not always a dodgy practice, there are very legit practises out there, but that as a business model is not a great business model. And it's not great for a contract.

So, what you want to do instead is ask:

• How many hours per month am I paying for? And what does that get me?
• What reporting, what contact, what are you working on in the website?
• Can you please explain to me how your 30 hours per month are going to be allocated?

You would expect with an agency they are going to do some sort of audit of the website to start with as well as a plan. It might be starting with mobile optimisation, for example, and site speed.

And each month you would expect to have at least a monthly report, if not a fortnightly report, and in that report, it would outline, these are the tasks that we have done, these are the tasks that are coming in, these are the things that we would like you to do, and here is the impact that we are seeing in search results. Plus, a hypothesis on why increases or decreases might occur.

Again, it takes three to six months, and you will naturally see fluctuations in results in that time, that might be because they've done really good SEO, but perhaps there's a decrease because a competitor has entered the market or there is a seasonality that might occur at a certain time of year, a lull in traffic industry-wide. So, they should really be able to step you through and explain all of this stuff.

If they’re saying ‘we'll rank you for keywords’ and they come back saying that these keywords are mostly your brand name, it's very easy for any business to rank for their brand name, so it means they're not really doing much work (because you were already ranking for it). And a lot of SEO practises are site-wide, so it doesn't matter what keywords, as all of the keywords are affected when you are doing that work. 

Holly: OK, that's really good advice – thank you.

Understanding SEO and SEM: The Essentials originally appeared on CommsClass, a marketing blog which helps the wine, food, hospitality and tourism sector, based in Melbourne, Australia.