SEO and SEM - Friends or Foes?

When SEM (search engine marketing) agencies first started to hear about SEO (search engine optimization) there was a fear that they would start to lose business. SEO sounded like the arch enemy of SEM. Instead of clients paying to appear on the search engines they would work out how to get their site in the listings for free. Who needs paid listings when you’re top of the organic listings?

Thankfully, ideas have evolved. SEO and SEM work well together and can offer different strengths.

Many agencies who had previously thought SEO would have a negative impact on their business now embrace it and offer it as part of their service. What SEO offers is a long term strategy to improving site visits.

By tailoring you page titles, making good use of your h1, h2 and h3 header tags, maximising keyword use and anchor text while creating quality back links your site can appear high in the organic listings for the terms that you have designed your pages for.

For example if you want to appear near the top of the organic listings for a term such as ‘cheap car insurance’ then best practice would be to apply the following on your page:

- URL in format www.example.com/cheap-car-insurance
- Page title would read something like ‘Cheap car insurance from Company X’
- The keywords ‘cheap car insurance’ would appear numerous times on the page
- Both internal and external pages linking into that specific page with the keywords ‘cheap car insurance’ in the anchor text.

If you do SEO properly then you will get clicks for free but if you have a fresh offer your site will take time to get spidered and start showing up in the organic listings.

This is where SEM will deliver better results. You can create the campaign straight away in adCenter and have your ads appearing in the paid listings.

For example, if you have an entertainment site and big news has come out from Hollywood or you have a computer games site and the latest game has just hit the shops, then there is nothing as quick as PPC to provide you with visibility.

So while you are waiting to bear the fruits of your SEO techniques you can set up a SEM ad in the following format:

{Celebrity X} and {celebrity Y} spotted together
Read it here first. X and Y back together after 3 years apart!
www.example.com/celebrityX-celebrityY

Some say organic results are what people trust more as being relevant to their keyword search, but with search engines such as Live Search having strict guidelines in verifying that ads and landing pages have a direct relation to what the user is searching for, paid listings continue to grow in credibility and SEM gives you the ability to create catchy titles and ad descriptions that grab people’s attention.

In summary, SEM works great for the present, great for special offers that are time sensitive and great for building brand awareness. SEO works great for the long term. Together they can work in harmony.

For more help with your organic search listings with Live.com, visit http://webmaster.live.com and check out their Live Search Webmaster Blog