What is the difference between SEO and SEA?
What is the difference between SEO and SEA? There are different digital marketing techniques that can help to get your website out to your target audience. The marketing techniques you can do this through is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Search Engine Advertising (SEA). These different techniques will allow you to connect with your target audience when they search for a term related to your business.
Looking for the right method to get the word out about your business depends on:
- How much time you are willing to spend
- How much money you are willing to spend
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
What is SEO?
SEO is a useful digital marketing technique that increases your visibility to your target audience through unpaid results in search engines (e.g. Google, Bing). The main function this can do for your website. One is crawling and building an index.
Why is SEO Important?
SEO is important as it will bring traffic to your website. This means that people, within your target audience, will be able to see your website more often than your competitors. The more visitors your website has, the more potential those visitors will become customers/clients.
Advantages and Disadvantages of SEO
An advantage of using SEO techniques is it will provide results that are long-term instead of something that will only be seen for a set amount of time. This means you don’t need to worry about having to do a lot of work all of the time as the results will be there. You can easily do SEO work that covers 3 months, then do it 3 months down the line after the work you’ve done. This, in the long run, will increase your SEO ranking without the worry of paying a lot of money to get your ranking up.
A disadvantage of using SEO is that it will take a long time before any results appear. As this is an unpaid option in getting your brand noticed, it does mean for any results to come in it will take time. This would mean you to give it a few months until you can see any results from trying different SEO techniques to get your brand up in the rankings.
Even though it does take a while for your website URL to rank high within search engines, it does give you results that will provide good things for your company. These are; increased visibility, increased accessibility, and increased brand awareness. With these things increased, this will mean your website will be receiving more visitors which will, therefore, increase the number of customers you are getting over time.
Search Engine Advertising (SEA)
What is SEA?
Even though SEO and SEA sound similar, there are differences between them. SEA increases the traffic to your website through digital marketing advertising instead of SEO techniques. That means your business pays the publisher of the advert (e.g. Google, Bing, etc.) every time a visitor clicks on your ad when it becomes available on that search engine. These advertisements are highlights on the top of the results page where they are on top of the unpaid results or on the right-hand side of them.
SEA has other abbreviations that you may have seen or heard of before. These are Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Cost Per Click (CPC) or Pay Per Click (PPC).
Advantages and Disadvantages of SEA
An advantage of SEA is that you can control where your visitors go on your website. Whereas SEO techniques are for your specific keywords, SEA offers you the chance to create an ad for every landing page you have within your website. For example, if you would want to showcase a specific service (e.g. graphic design) your company offers, then you can create an ad for that URL. This will, therefore, get more people looking on your page which will. If this happens, it will increase the number of enquiries you have from customers about that specific service.
However, SEA campaigns have a time limit. This means that your SEA campaign won’t be on your chosen search engine for longer than you have set it up for. This means this becomes a short term solution in getting results. This is because results will only occur when your ad is up and available on the different search engines. Therefore, you would need to work on your SEO to get your URL more visible on the different search engines.
SEA campaigns are a perfect thing for new businesses. This is because it gets the word out about your company’s website faster than SEO can. This can be done by making sure your URL is one of the top ones that are shown on search when searching a specific phrase or keywords within the search bar of the search engine. Aside from the speed of the results, this can be said to be good for new businesses by the flexibility and possibly low cost of the campaign.
The use of both SEO and SEA within your marketing techniques will get the word out about your website and company to your target audience faster than your competitors who are doing one or the other. Both of these marketing techniques will be beneficial to your business and you can see this by watching your client/customer list increase.
Need help?
If you require further help or enquiries regarding any of our services, don’t hesitate to contact Snob Monkey. We will be happy to answer any questions you may have.
Email: contactus@snobmonkey.com
Telephone: 0800 368 9336
