SEO & SEM, the Differences Explained & Impacts On Getting New Customers
Most private practice medical or dental practices are unaware of the differences between Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and their impact on the ability to get new customers – are you?
Many of our clients have shared similar stories with us about their prior experiences with other SEO Company’s they’ve worked with, or who have called pitching their services to help get new customers. The business’ lack of knowledge concerning the difference between SEO and SEM has often resulted in their losing money when working with these other companies. Many online SEO and SEM products are advertised in such a way so as to take advantage of their ignorance because they tout SEO as being the total answer when it is, in our opinion, less than half the answer to get new customers. So understanding the following explanation is a must when determining the Best SEO and Internet Marketing Company to work with to get new customers.
Search Engine Optimization or SEO
Search Engine Optimization, SEO, or what is sometimes referred to as “on-page SEO,” is related to the work you do on a website to make it easy for each of the search engines to explore the site, find all of the relevant content and then rate that content highly relevant for the keywords and ideal customers the site is targeting. The key to SEO is first understanding your ideal customers, how they want to interact with you online, and how they search for businesses like yours including which keyword phrases they use.
The science behind SEO includes things such as keyword density, keyword analysis, page titles, internal link analysis, page descriptions, header tags, alt tags, site maps and more.
In summary, you want to help the search engines to fully discover, index and rate your website as having high authority related to your desired ideal customer targets and the keyword phrases they use to search for businesses like yours. This is crucial in order to get newcustomers.
Search Engine Marketing or SEM
Search Engine Marketing, SEM, or what is sometimes referred to as “off-site SEO” involves a variety of different tactics that professional SEO/SEM companies such as Summit Marketing uses to rank the pages of client websites more highly in search engine results. The science behind professional SEM mainly involves building hundreds or thousands of “back links” or what are considered “ranking votes” by the search engines.
However, it should be noted that not all SEO companies actually provide links for their clients or may in fact provide bad links for them.
Back links occur naturally when other websites reference your website when they are speaking about a particular subject or keyword. This reference involves including a live URL link within the content on their website to the page of your website they think is most relative to their content.
When the search engine finds this new link while indexing the pages and content on their site, the search engine spider, whose purpose is to follow all links and analyze the keyword relevancy of the content on each page they index, then follows the new link to your website noting the keyword relevancy of the linking site and noting the keyword relevancy of the content on your page.
This indexing of links along with analyzing page rank, page authority and hundreds of other factors which the search engines do not completely reveal ultimately determines where each page of your website dynamically ranks each time there is a search for keywords related to your content. That’s right – this ranking occurs each time there is a search so it is a very competitive and dynamic process as a result.
In summary, professional SEM providers such as Summit Marketing generate back links or votes for your website that capitalize on the SEO completed for your site but in a way that looks natural to the websites so you will rank higher in search engine results without being penalized.
What this Means to Your Business
As you can see, it’s important to understand the difference between SEO and SEM so that you know that you’re getting both on-site and off-site needs covered. It does little good to have good SEO without good SEM and vice versa.
All SEO & SEM packages are not created equal. Back links are not created equal. In fact, some types of back links are practically useless and can even be harmful to your website. The expert teams at Summit Marketing have been providing SEO & SEM services to companies all over the world since 1986 without one site being penalized.
In fact, over the past 6 months, we had over 239 new clients for which we generated over 11,000 first page Google rankings for their keywords.
To Get New Customers
We are the Best SEO Company, bar none. Call our service today at (916) 382-7229 to schedule a free initial consultation, or contact us online to schedule a call to learn more about the difference between SEO and SEM and the difference between Summit Marketing SEO and all the rest.