Everyone knows that the acronym SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and therefore indicates all those techniques aimed at optimizing a website and its contents for search engines with regard to organic searches. As you certainly know, however, not all the results we find on the SERPs are the same: some, in fact, did not reach the top of the first page for a particular merit, but rather in the face of a reasonable payment. In this case, however, we no longer speak of SEO, but rather of… SEA. That's right: the discipline that deals with the creation of paid ads on search engines and partner sites is called Search Engine Advertising, in acronym SEA. Many, however, paying little attention to the lexicon, have forgotten this term, starting to use the term SEM in its place. The latter, however, is the acronym for Search Engine Marketing, a branch of web marketing that includes all those activities aimed at generating more traffic through search engines. Both SEO and SEA, therefore, constitute internal areas of SEM and it is therefore completely wrong to use the latter term to indicate only Search Engine Advertising activities. Clear?
What does it mean to deal with Search Engine Advertising
After this short but fundamental lexical lesson, we can move on to discover what are the main SEA activities, to understand consequently why these should be combined with your SEO strategy to get the best results (that's right: SEO and SEA do not they are mutually exclusive, indeed, they give their best when used simultaneously).
Let's start with what are the points of contact between these two worlds. In both cases, both as regards Search Engine Optimization and as regards Search Engine Advertising, the concept of keyword, and therefore of keyword, is central. That's not all: the main goal of both these sets of techniques is to generate an ever-increasing flow of qualified traffic to your website. That's right, we said 'qualified': no optimization can in fact be defined as such if the public attracted to our portal is not interested in our products or our services. Always remember: no company thrives on visualizations alone; in fact, conversions and therefore, in the end, sales are needed. All the remaining intermediate steps are but many small steps towards the goal.
So what are the SEA activities? There is no doubt that the main expression of Search Engine Advertising is Pay per Click campaigns.
How do SEO campaigns works
The first fundamental step to start a SEM campaign is identifying the best keywords around which to structure your advertisements. Therefore, if you need to search for the keywords for your generic content for SEO, in the case of SEA the same operation must be done for paid ads: as you can imagine, making the two strategies converge is certainly an excellent idea.
The choice of keywords with regard to the SEA is however made more complicated by the cost of each individual keyword. In the Google environment, within AdWords, actual auctions take place, in which shareholders interested in a particular keyword battle it out to conquer it. It therefore follows that the different keywords have a different cost per click, based on what are the monthly searches, the competition, the requests, the maximum offers made by advertisers and many other factors.
What are the advantages of SEM over SEO?
Many believe they can do without the SEM completely, betting everything on SEO. And yes, it is certainly possible to achieve good results in this way too but, especially in competitive sectors, the results can never be excellent. And even less fast: the main advantage of the SEA is in fact its speed: in the face of the payment required to start a PPC campaign, the results are practically immediate. An SEO strategy, on the other hand, requires several weeks to bear fruit, which however, compared to that of the SEA, are certainly more lasting over time.
