If you’re unsure as to what Search Engine Marketing (also known as Pay-Per-Click advertising and Sponsored Search) entails, there are two excellent breakdowns in brief here, or in detail here.

SEO is a blanket term that’s used to describe the process of enhancing your website, its content and its meta-data (that is, the information contained in each webpage that humans don’t usually see, but which machines – which includes Google’s search – interpret).

Undertaking SEO can be a project that varies greatly both in time & cost, and in overall effect to your business’s bottom line – the latter of which is determined by several factors. Generally, when you deal with a quality SEO agent you’ll enjoy the benefits of sitting closer to the top of results page for a handful of searches related to your business.

With any SEO service your website is modified (and sometimes re-engineered) to target a handful of specific keywords. Over time, your SEO agent will alter your website to feature the keywords (or clauses) that you’ve chosen to be ‘ranked’ for (that is, to increase the rank of one’s website in search engine results pages so that it appears closer to the revered #1 spot on Google).

SEO is a process that takes time, and one which relies on Google revisiting your website to glean new information from it – which can happen as often as every day (for very popular sites) to every few weeks (for the rest of us). Every time your website is modified to better target your keywords, along with it comes an inevitable wait for Google to revisit your website. As website rankings are constantly changing, maintaining your ranking for a specific keyword is an ongoing task that requires a fair amount of maintenance.

So for example, if you’re a plumber in Chatswood, it would make sense to choose SEO keywords such as chatswood plumber, or north shore plumbing (Chatswood being a suburb in Sydney’s north shore). These would be an example of some common keywords a customer might use to find a local plumber on Google.

Whilst being near the top of organic results for “chatswood plumbing” or “north shore plumbing” would be great for a plumber servicing Chatswood, relying on these two (and a few more) keywords alone will inevitably lead to a loss of many potential customers.

The trouble is that many more customers will search for terms such as emergency plumbing artarmon or 24 hour plumbing lindfield [where Artarmon and Lindfield are both surrounding suburbs of Chatswood]. And that’s where Search Engine Optimisation begins to fall short. With Pay-Per-Click, not only can you have your ad shown above your competitors’ organic listings, but you can also customise each message according to your audience. Examples below:

plumbing chatswood	emergency plumbing artarmon	24 hour plumbing lindfield
For our Chatswood customers (a bustling commercial and business area with many high-rise apartments) we can emphasise your speed of service.	For Artarmon customers (a mix of commercial, industrial and suburban), we can tailor your advertising to reflect cost-effectiveness.	For Lindfield customers (consisting of mostly privately-owned homes) we can emphasise personal service and guarantee for homeowners looking for a quality plumber.

 Seeing as the cost and scale of an SEO project goes up with each keyword targeted it can begin to look a little daunting for first time businesses looking to introduce SEO to their website. Just don’t expect this same sort of reach or the immediacy of pay-per-click!

Google AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing are great for their inherent versatility. Google pay-per-click ads can be modified quickly to adapt to any changes in the market, and they can apply to more than a few keywords at once, each with individualised messages to suit your target audience.

With respect to SEO, we believe that a holistic approach to marketing your business online involves both components of search engine optimisation and pay-per-click advertising. After all, our aim is to get your customers onto your website and dialling your phone – and both technologies offer a different way of doing that. Search Engine Marketing happens to have the advantage of being more agile, more accountable, and with a faster, more pronounced return on your investment.