SEO is a sector of the marketing industry that focuses on growing the visibility of a website organically in major search engines, such as Google. SEO involves bringing together the technical and creative elements of a website that are required to improve search engine rankings, drive traffic and increase general awareness of the website. There are many aspects to SEO strategies, from the content on the website to the way links from other sites interact with the website. Sometimes improving your website’s SEO is as simple as making sure that it is structured in a way that makes it easier for search engines to understand it.

As you will know by now, SEO is short for search engine optimisation and it sounds mystical but it is really a lot simpler than it appears. You may have heard a lot of things about SEO and how it works, but it is basically a measurable and repeatable process that marketing companies use to send signals to search engines to prove that it is worth ranking highly, for example in Google’s index.

Search engines use a complex algorithm to score every website and every search its users do in order to work out which websites should rank best for what terms are being searched for. The algorithms have hundreds of points that they score your website on, many of which are not public knowledge, and an SEO’s job is to help your website score highly for as many of these points as possible.

There are five steps that must be taken to do basic SEO on a website. Content optimisation and submission will help lay the foundations for your SEO strategy and are detailed below:

1.        Create page titles: It is important to create keyword-based titles that help to establish the theme and direction of the page and what keywords it will focus on.

2.        Create meta tags: Meta descriptions are the summary of text you see under search results and they can influence the click-throughs of your website aren’t directly used for rankings.

3.        Place strategic search phrases on pages: Keywords that are appropriate for your target audience’s searches should be integrated into your website source code and existing content.

4.        Develop new sitemaps for Google and Bing: Sitemaps make it easier for search engines to crawl and index your website. You need to create both XML and HTML versions. They can easily be submitted to both Google and Bing via their own webmaster tools.

5.        Submit website to directories: Usually you wouldn’t submit your URL to major search engines, but there are ways to speed up the indexing while building links to your website. Submitting your website to local and online directories means that Google can crawl it and find your URL quickly.

SEO is the process marketing companies use to optimise your website for the purpose of increasing organic (free) traffic to your website from search engines.

SEM includes SEO but extends to the process of achieving the overall goal of more visibility in search engines through both organic traffic (SEO) and paid traffic (PPC).

Ranking your site organically and involves a lot of in-depth knowledge of how websites work, so it you are not a web expert and are looking to Google to bring new traffic then a PPC campaign through Google AdWords might be for you.

Through a PPC campaign, you pay Google however much you desire to get your ads listed at the top of organic search listings. When someone clicks on your ad in search listings, you will pay the current Cost Per Click (CPC) from your budget. Once the budget you have set is all spent, Google will stop running your ads until you add more money to your account.

PPC is a lot easier to implement than SEO, but rushing the process can be a disaster if you don’t know the basics of setting up a campaign. Knowing how to set it up properly will enable you to launch an effective campaign and bring new visitors to your site. Paying an agency to do this for you can often lead to better results, as they won’t make any mistakes.

There is no exact answer for how much PPC costs as it varies from one campaign to the next, depending on targeting and the niche of the business. However, there is information about the average PPC costs that can help you determine roughly how much you will be spending. Please find this information in the table below:

The terms PPC and CPC are often used in the same context within the advertising community. However, PPC stands for Pay-Per-Click which refers to the type of advertising program that is being run, where as CPC stands for Cost Per Click which is how much you are paying per click in your advertising program. To use these terms appropriately when speaking to an agency about running an advertising campaign, you could say, “We are looking to run a PPC campaign with Google AdWords and would like the average CPC to be $0.75.” The amount you pay per click is set by Google’s bidding process which rewards those with a bigger PPC budget.

If you are not already running a campaign to draw more people to your business, you’re probably losing money. According to shopping trends, over 80% of people prefer to shop online, so this is where you will find a lot of customers. For small businesses, PPC advertising is a great option for growing their business. Below are some of the benefits you will see from running a PPC campaign.

•             PPC boosts traffic to your website.

•             PPC increases sales.

•             PPC helps you control your advertising costs.

•             You only pay when someone clicks on your ad.

•             PPC allows you to analyse the performance of your ads in real time.

•             PPC can help increase brand recognition for remarketing

•             PPC advertising is not difficult to produce.

The benefits of PPC are particularly extended when you make use of a digital marketing agency as they can put all the time and effort into optimising your ads to reach the best potential customers while you pay a small fee for their time. This can be a good solution for someone who wants to grow their small business but doesn’t have the time to do so.

Unlike Google AdWords, with Facebook Ads, your advertisements will appear in users’ newsfeeds as they scroll through posts from friends and pages they like.

However, at their base level, they function very similarly. You pay a fixed amount every time someone clicks on your ad and your CPC is determined by how many people your ad reaches and how competitive that audience is.

Facebook ads can also include text, photos and even videos so they are more visually appealing and creative than Google Ads, which only allow you to include a small amount of text. They can appear on the sidebar or in the newsfeed on the desktop version of the site and on mobile apps and the mobile version they will appear like a normal post in your target audiences newsfeed.

You select your objective, audience, placement, budget and schedule. So, you can target exactly what kind of person you want to see your ad based on location, age, gender, language, demographics, interests, behaviours and whether you know the people that will be seeing the ads.