SEO, PPC, and Analytics: A Brief Overview
You’re eating a new brand of breakfast bars, and then a question comes to mind. Something along the lines of: “What are the healthiest granola bars?” In decades past, one might have looked in a book or asked a fellow friend. Now the answer is at the tips of one’s fingers. You just open up your smartphone or laptop and type the answer right into the search button. The results of answering this question can be in the thousands with many different websites aiming to inform, sell, or convince a user that they are the best option to fulfill their needs.
From here digital marketing can really bring brands to where the user is in their search efforts. At Seer Interactive I intern in three areas: Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Pay Per Click (PPC), and Analytics. Here, I have learned the tactics that companies can use to appear in the best position for when their consumers search for them.
Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) relies on how you show up in organic search, which includes the free or non-paid for results that show up in a search engine. It’s where marketers focus on getting to the top of the list when a user searches for certain keywords related to a business, service or product. SEO uses a combination of both on-page tactics and off-page tactics to push users higher up in the rankings. Higher rankings come from making sure your specific website is using the right tactics to show search engines what is on your page and why it is better than the other website (competitor) to give a user the answer they need.
Pay Per Click
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertisements are the paid advertisements that often show at the very top of the page otherwise known as a SERP (Search Engine Results Page) and along the side when using a search engine such as Google, Bing or Yahoo. These ads often have something that shows they are a paid advertisement such as on Google, the word “AD” is highlighted in yellow to show users this is a paid advertisement. They also display advertisements that you see on the pages you visit and the pre-roll shown before watching a video online.
Analytics
Analytics brings SEO PPC, and other additional digital marketing strategies together by using what many call “Big Data.” Some of questions Analytics can help answer include “How are certain web pages performing?What source/medium are they coming through?What terms are people searching for once they visit my site?Analytics helps to make sense of the data that comes from your website, digital advertisements, or even app. It also can help you tie back non-digital marketing to see how this has made an impact on your online strategy. So while users can create insights and push users to their site using just one of these three pieces, the full puzzle is complete when they all are leveraged.
For the best overall and holistic search engine marketing plan, the use of all three of these services will help to gets customers to a companies’ page. They allow for brands to give the strongest user experience online, which ultimately leads to higher brand awareness, purchase intent, and overall better Return on Investment.
