There are many ways to promote yourself: among them there are paid and almost "free" ones, those that bring quick results and work for the future. Most of them can be divided into three types - SEO, PPC and SEM. The Ringostat platform talks about these three concepts, their advantages and disadvantages, and in which cases they are more suitable.

It might seem that only specialists need to know these abbreviations. And if you order a promotion from an agency or freelancer, you don't need to figure it out. But we still advise you to delve into the differences between SEO, PPC and SEM.

So you can:

• speak the same language with a promotion specialist;
• learn more about each approach and choose the most suitable one for yourself;
• learn something useful for yourself in SEO, PPC and SEM.

So let's get started.

Search Engine Optimization - a set of measures to increase a site's visibility in search engines for targeted queries. Simply put, the main goal of SEO is to promote a site to the top of search results in order to increase targeted traffic, i.e. the number of potential customers. To do this, the specialist optimizes the site so that the search engine finds it informative, useful and relevant to specific search queries.

Important note: not everything you see in search results is SEO-related. For example, if you type the search query "custom furniture" into Google, you will see ads in the search results, which may be at the top and bottom of the page. But the "middle" will be occupied by so-called "organic search results."

Positioning can be considered a "free" way of promotion, since a company does not pay to have its site displayed in Google search results. This is in contrast to contextual advertising, in which the advertiser must assign a sufficient cost to click on the ad. Otherwise his ad will not be displayed high enough.

But of course, SEO is not free. The company pays for the work of an SEO specialist, the purchase of links, tools to help find errors on the site that negatively affect its ranking, etc.

5. Internal optimization of the site: technical and substantive. The first means the actions that a specialist performs with the source code of the site's pages. The second is to ensure that visitors see useful and understandable information about your resource. Usually, the SEO specialist himself does not write the content, but develops the terms of reference for the content marketer.
6. Analytics. After all the work is done, the specialist regularly monitors, analyzes web analytics reports, how users behave on the site and reach the site. He tracks and analyzes the positions the site occupies in search results.

• Phone call analysis - working with call tracking.
• If customers call frequently at a particular company, a PPC specialist pays attention to whether there are calls from ads. This can be analyzed in the reports of the call tracking service - down to the source, channel, campaign and keyword that led to the call. A specialist can immediately listen to audio recordings of the calls to understand how users perceive the ad. Below is an example of the platform's report.

Ringostat:

First of all, if you have enough budget for promotion and want to attract customers now. Contextual advertising is also useful if you want to advertise a sale or promotion.

Keep in mind, however, that PPC is not very suitable in niches where users have not yet suggested such a need - and are simply not searching for your products or services. Above all, this applies to innovative companies that have invented a new product. Or they introduce to the local market what is still popular only in other countries. Of course, such a situation is not a verdict, but a specialist will have to be very inventive to reach the target group.

Search Engine Marketing - this method combines SEO and PPC approaches. It is also sometimes referred to as integrated Internet marketing. The main task of an SEM specialist is to improve the visibility of the site and bring as much targeted traffic to it as possible, using both SEO and paid advertising.

As we mentioned above, when a query is typed into a search engine, both organic results and ads are displayed in the search results. An SEM specialist strives to make his brand visible both there and there. After all, there are always people who trust "free" results more, and there are those who click on ads more often because it looks more noticeable.

SEO and PPC, which make up SEM, in turn help strengthen the promotion strategy.
The internal optimization of a site ensures a good reputation in terms of search engines. As a result, the site eventually begins to rank better. A convenient page hierarchy and clear navigation reduce the rejection rate.

Advertising, in turn, allows you to quickly attract visitors to the site. And if the site is convenient and contains useful content, users will stay on the site - and this will increase site performance. Which, in turn, is good for SEO. In addition, SEM specialists use keywords commonly used in Google Ads to boost a site's position in search results.
With an integrated approach, the likelihood that a site will be on the first page of search results is higher.

Given that SEM encompasses both SEO and paid advertising, a specialist deals with quite diverse tasks. They are in many ways similar to what we have already described above, so we will only discuss them briefly.

1. Setting up and running ads, learning what words from Google Ads can be used to promote the site organically.
2. Studying your competitors' experience - both for PPC and SEO. Analytics: what keywords competitors are positioning for, what their sites and ads look like, where they place backlinks, etc.
3. Setting rates for contextual ads and managing budgets.
4. Conducting A/B testing for both paid advertising placements and to increase site conversions.
5. Workа with the site's code: for this, the specialist must know HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
6. Tracking positions in search results on a daily basis, determining possible reasons for settling.
7. Deciding which keywords to position organically rather than contextually. They usually resort to this when it comes to overpriced keywords.

1. If contextual advertising in your niche is too expensive and doesn't pay well, SEM is not for you. You will have to bet only on SEO.
2. You'll need to get your strategy right. And you will need a team to implement it, not a single employee. Because not many people can combine an excellent SEO specialist and an experienced PPC specialist in one person.
3. In any case, you need to get things right on the site first. No matter how attractive the advertising is, without a prepared site and correcting errors, SEM won't work.

When to bet on SEM?
Here it's all simple - SEM is appropriate if you have the ability to take care of both SEO and PPC, and at the same time and equally carefully so that they reinforce each other.

Don't ignore any of the approaches described. Even if you rely mainly on ads, they won't work when you have a clumsy and outdated site. In addition, SEO is suitable for those who are not in a hurry in the race for customers and are willing to wait several months for results.

At the same time, advertising is essential in almost all areas of business. Especially where there are very strong competitors or aggregator sites at the top of the subject. Such as in real estate, for example. PPC is best for those who have an advertising budget and want to get customers as quickly as possible.

SEM combines both of these approaches. Choose it if you have both an SEO and PPC specialist on your team. This approach works well because the user sees your site at the top of both organic and search results. You can also choose which keywords to promote in organic - and spend less money if they are expensive.