SEO Vs SEA: Managing your digital marketing budget well . How to prioritize SEO and search engine advertising in your digital marketing budget? We suggest you follow this short guide to optimize your investments.
Whether you’re new to managing your online presence or a seasoned digital marketing professional, the many possibilities of the digital world can be complex and it’s often hard to get started. In addition to the difficulty of planning activities and allocating resources, it’s also difficult to prioritize your digital marketing budget and manage your investments as efficiently as possible.
Two tactics are more widely known: SEO and SEA (Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Advertising)
SEO
SEO Vs SEA: Managing your digital marketing budget well. Let’s start with SEO. SEO or search engine optimization is actually a term that comes from the days when you could still spam search engines by applying black hat optimization techniques . Nowadays, SEO shouldn’t just be thought of as optimizing your website for search engines. Optimize the experience you offer your visitors and search engines will reward you with better rankings. But since this is still the commonly used terminology, we’ll continue to use this acronym until we find a more current one.
The SEA
SEA orsearch engine advertisingis a form of paid marketing that aims to get you ahead of your competitors by paying a search engine (e.g. Google) to display your page at the top of their results. You do this by bidding on keywords that you believe will generate valuable visitors to your pages.
In the field of SEA, a common mistake is to ignore website optimization and cut this budget line to assign everything to Google Ads while waiting to be first on the results pages.
First of all, there is a difference between paid and organic search results .
Paid results are displayed at the top of the page with the designation “Ad,” while organic search results are displayed at the bottom of the page. Organic search results are not affected in any way by paid advertising on Google.
The Google Ads algorithm is complex and does not simply give first place to the highest bidder. Google Ads, Google’s SEA service, uses a quality score to determine who deserves the best position in paid search results. This Ad Rank is an internal score that consists of 4 main parameters:
-
Your bid level: How much money are you bidding for a click?
- The quality of the ad you display
- The quality of the content on the page you are directing visitors to: Is the homepage easy to navigate, optimized for mobile use, unique, fast loading, etc.
- The relevance of this page to visitors: will clicking on your ad provide an answer or solution to the person searching?
This means that even if you have the highest bid for a certain keyword, you can still lose your position to a competitor who has been more successful in providing relevant, high-quality content to search engine users.
A quality industrial email list should be precise, current, and tailored to your particular market. It should give you access to important industry decision-makers’ industry email list contact details as well as insightful information and statistics that will enable you to successfully customize your marketing campaigns.
This brings us back to our initial concern about budget priorities, and it’s clear that you should definitely invest time and effort into developing a solid SEO strategy for your website before supplementing it further with pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns.
Strategic thinking
In my opinion, the following things should always be kept in mind when developing your SEO strategy:
SEO isn’t just a quick fix that you can apply to certain pages on your site. To optimize your website in depth, you’ll need a redesign that starts with the foundations. This means starting at a more technical level to improve page speed, title tags, meta descriptions, redirects, etc., and then moving on to a content strategy to improve factors like authority and backlinksrelevant websites.
SEO is not a goal in itself, but rather one of the means to improve the quality of your website, increase organic traffic and ultimately drive conversions.
SEO should not be seen as a sideline marketing activity, but as a checklist of the parameters that make up your website. Below is a quick and detailed overview of some checks to get you started:
- Each page has a unique title tag
- All relevant pages have a meta description tag
- The URLs are well structured (understandable, logical, use of hyphens, etc.)
- All images have alt text
- A sitemap is available to make search engine crawling more efficient.
- Good page speed: >80 on PageSpeed score
Once SEO is in place and you are happy with your organic search engine rankings, you can consider allocating some of your budget to
By starting the other way around, you risk wasting a significant portion of your digital marketing budget by putting the questions to ask yourself in the wrong order.
In conclusion, investing in when your website does not comply with SEO guidelines and standards will be rather useless, because Google Ads ranks ads with similar criteria to organic search results.
We all know that a website has two main objectives. The first is of course a notoriety objective, to make your company and product known, and the second is a conversion objective. While the first is relatively easy to achieve, the second is much more difficult.
Clearly define your objective
Optimizing your website’s conversions inevitably involves a long phase of reflection well in advance. This reflection stage will require looking at certain essential points in terms of marketing strategy.
- Who are my visitors?
- What do they want to find on my site?
- What answer will I be able to give them?
- What will be the different stages they will have to go through?
To answer all these questions, defining a persona is essential. By knowing your target better, you will be able to offer them suitable content.
The upstream marketing reflection stage involves what we are going to offer to the Internet user, but also how we are going to do it. Taking into consideration the hungary phone number database user experience is essential to optimize the conversions of your website. A new series of questions will have to determine:
- Are my products easy to find? Is navigation smooth?
- Is the presentation attractive?
- Is the tree structure easy to understand?
Set conversion tools:
SEO Vs SEA: Managing your digital marketing budget well. To optimize your website conversions, you also need to define the marketing levers that you will use to increase contacts. Namely:
- Email Sending: Plan to Define Your Email Campaigns
- Calls: Set up forms to collect data and call back your leads
- Online reservations
To help you set up actions that will lead the Internet user to convert, you can also use campaign managers like MailChimp. This type of tool will also allow you to set up marketing automation campaigns. That is to say, you can define scenarios like: “if the visitor goes to the product sheet of such an item, I can send them a promotional offer”
Also, don’t neglect landing pages to your site. These pages highlight your company or services and have no other purpose than to attract people to your website.
How to capture and retain their interest?
Optimizing your website’s conversions inevitably involves content. The biggest job is to define an editorial strategy. The editorial strategy will be based on:
- The development of an editorial charter: this will determine the tone to adopt, but will also define the content to produce.
- The editorial schedule.
Afterwards, it will be necessary to create content that corresponds to your offer. This could be a blog post that highlights your product or services. Of course, at the adb directory end of your content, it will be imperative to insert a call to action.
The hardest part when setting up a conversion funnel is to keep the user interested until the end. Also, to optimize the conversions of your website, it is better to reduce the conversion funnel. Reducing the conversion funnel also involves removing pages that ask your visitor for too much information.
What actions at each stage of the conversion funnel?
- Create content that is adapt to the user journey. It is essential to position and think UX design to offer effective content. Do you have a services page? Offer a registration for a training course, the download of an e-book or even a promotional offer for the purchase of a service.
- A/B testing: this step is a test step that will take place before the implementation of a final version of an advertisement or newsletter for example. It allows you to test 2 versions of a message.
-
Last step: the CTA
- The Call To Action or commonly called CTA, is a short sentence or a button that will make the Internet user take action. This incentive must be brief and impactful and must necessarily redirect to the contact page, to an appointment schedule or else encourage putting an item in the basket.
Implementing actions to optimize
Your website conversions is a good thing. It will then be necessary to measure its performance. This is the analysis part that you can perfectly carry out via the Google Analytics platform.
Do you want to define your digital strategy but you don’t know where to start?
Contact us for a free initial interview during which we can advise you on your current project and give you some ideas for developing your digital strategy. Using a web agency specializing in digital communication and marketing will give you a serious advantage in your market.
