SEO Blueprints

I do both SEO and SEM, and do them for different reasons. SEM is by far a much faster way to make money than doing SEO when starting out, but also more unpredictable and volatile.

For clarification’s sake:
SEO = Search Engine Optimization. Although used broadly to often encompass the entire internet marketing industry, I am using it is it’s more specific definition in this article to mean ranking well for organic search.
SEM = Search Engine Marketing. ie. Using PPC search engine ads

Ranking for the search engines organically can take some time, especially when only using White Hat methods. You can cut this time down by getting some great links to your site, but even then you will probably only rank semi-well for uncompetitive terms, if anything for a while.

Search engine marketing you can do immediately. You just buy ads on the search engines and send the traffic to your site. Even if you don’t want to invest a lot of money in traffic, you could still help yourself a great deal by starting off with some cheap PPC advertising to get eyeballs on your site. From here, they can bookmark it, tell their friends about it, submit it to a social bookmarking site, or even link to you. SEM will improve your SEO!

Even if you are just breaking even or possibly even losing money, the long term effect of your advertising could very well pay off in the form of future traffic. Although Google’s Quality Score is a pain for many arbitrageurs and PPC advertisers, it should actually make it easier for you to get at least some inexpensive traffic to your site, particularly if your ads are very closely related to your site content.

When SEM is Working On Its Own

You could find a great combination of low priced PPC traffic and a monetization method that pays you more than what you spend. This is an excellent situation to have, but it is often very unscalable. Often it only works when you are cutting yourself down to only the cheapest incoming traffic and once you increase your CPC, you see the profits diminish quickly.

Additionally, once you have that perfect setup, Google Adwords, or the other search engines could simply change their algorithm (like adding the Quality Score) or simply another advertiser could come in and take away your traffic by outbidding you. This can happen at any time. Plenty of people have noticed huge changes in income from these types of changes.

Adding SEO to your SEM sites can help you cushion your profits and make the site worth keeping and building. The good part about SEO is once you start doing well for one keyword, you often start doing well for others. If Google starts to see you as an authority or reputable site, other new content you create on the site would get indexed much faster than a new site starting out.

Performing SEO and getting higher organic rankings are generally a more long term play than SEM. The organic algorithm and results do not change near as fast as the ad market in search engines. SEO is a better long term play!

In essence, beginners should start with SEM to get the hang of the ads and get things going. Once you feel like you are happy and want to pursue the business seriously, then you can start thinking about building your own sites and growing them with both more SEM and SEO.

Filed under: SEM, SEO, Internet Marketing Industry