SEA: fast and targeted advertising to your target group
Let's start with advertising in google, also called SEA. Other names are Google Adwords or simply: Google Ads. SEA allows you to advertise online when users enter certain search terms in Google. If someone types in the search term on which you want to score with your pages, your advertisement will appear in various formats in the search engine or partner websites of Google. Sounds complicated? We are happy to explain it to you.
How does SEA work?
Suppose you have a website where you want to promote your services and products, but too few visitors find their way to your site. Then advertising in Google is a quick solution that you should definitely consider. The system works with a pay per click method: when a visitor clicks on your ad, you pay an amount. You control the amount yourself and adjust it whenever you want. However, there are a number of factors you need to take into account:
- the popularity or competition on a keyword you want to advertise on
- the quality of your ad and associated landing page the visitor lands on
Start with a goal
If you just start advertising in Google without a specific goal, there is a big chance that you will focus too much on keywords that have a lot of competition and that you will pay an unnecessary amount of money for. Therefore, start with a keyword research. In this analysis, you will examine how often certain keywords are searched for monthly and how big the competition is for those terms. Because words or word combinations that potential customers hardly search for have no added value. It is also best to map out the competition. For example, do you benefit from paying 8 euros for a click to your landing page?
What do I want to achieve with the advertisements?
The budget, the type of advertisements and the number of campaigns within Google Ads depend on the objectives you want to achieve. Do you want to focus on more brand awareness or generate more leads? Do you do a one-off campaign that should mainly yield results in the long term or do you need a short-term solution? By asking yourself these questions and by doing thorough keyword research, you will gain insight into how the campaign is best structured.
Difference with SEO: faster on #1 in Google
The biggest difference with SEO is the time you need to become visible in Google. Where with search engine optimization it can sometimes take a long time to rank at the very top, with SEA it is only a day's work to get you to the number 1 position. You participate in the auction for the search terms, bid more than the one who bids the most at that moment and you are number 1 in Google. BUT... that position also has a price tag. So don't get caught out and always check what the return of such a campaign can be.
Want to learn more about Google Ads? Discover how to achieve more through advertising in Google.
SEO: scoring in Google with a long-term vision
Where with SEA you can quickly and easily launch advertisements to rank in Google, with SEO need a bit more patience. Much depends on your vision and strategy in the long term but actually you can also achieve good results in the short term.
How does SEO work?
Google's crawler, spider or bot regularly visits your website to screen it. This way, Google learns what your website is about and how to interpret it. When Google knows exactly how your website is structured and what information it contains, your pages are 'indexed'. But that's just the beginning..
When someone searches for information and enters a specific search term in the search bar, Google always wants to present the most relevant page for that search query. In doing so, the crawler takes into account a number of factors that we can summarize as: technology, content and authority of the website. If you want to score better than others on a search term, you need to 'optimize for the search engine': SEO.
SEO techniques that work
Google updates its algorithm regularly and increasingly rewards companies that do not abuse gaps in the algorithm. Where it used to be possible to stuff your web page with keywords (keyword stuffing) using the so-called 'black hat method', the system seems to be better able to deal with the (right)ness of a page. Buying links to your page to increase the authority of your website in an unnatural way is also increasingly being punished. So you would do well to play the game by the rules and use 'white hat SEO'. That will yield you much more in the long term than techniques that mainly yield short term.
