SEM versus SEO
November 11, 2005
In the UK, SEM (search engine marketing) is way more popular and talked about than SEO (search engine optimisation). Yahoo! have outsourced all their SEM to external SEM agencies and SEM is driving huge amounts of traffic to sites such as Ladbrokes, Tesco Online, and the banks - to name a few.
Here on the other side of the puddle, things are different. Most businesses are very keen to have their sites SEO'ed. They want to be able to go in and search for their business offering and find themselves 'top of the pile'. The reason for this is because many of them never click on the right hand side themselves, so they don't believe in it.
I do though - and so do all of Brightspark's clients for whom we have run SEM campaigns. I prefer to call them pay per click campaigns because that is a more accurate description of what they are. (If you would like to read up on our approach to pay per click, you can here.)
With the increasing dilution of search engine results from blogs, jobs sites and other randoms that do not provide the answer to your search, people will be forced to look right and consider pay per click even more. Try looking for a conveyancing solicitor on Google Ireland right now and you'll see what I mean. You can't find one.
But you can find a number of switched on legal practices offering conveyancing services on the right hand side. It's even likely that many of these firms wouldn't appear on the left hand side because for small firms with a limited online marketing budget, pay per click is a nice inexpensive way of hitting the front page of the search engine results. It's also a nice way to guarantee a position there while working away on the SEO - because that takes up to 3 months.
The following article was sent to me recently and it raises the issue of how the web analytics vendors are responding to the need for reporting on SEM campaigns. Good article, but interesting to note how the UK writer refers to SEO as SEM's "little sister".