SEO, PPC, SEA, SEM, SMM, SMO: which promotion methods to choose?

Attracting traffic to the site is a key aspect for successful business development in the online environment. Everything is logical and clear here: the more people visit your site, the wider audience you can interest in your products, services, information, which will ultimately contribute to an increase in income and subsequent stable, effective work on the Internet. But how to achieve your goals? Today, there is a fairly large selection of methods for promoting sites on the Internet: SEO, PPC, SEA, SEM, SMM, SMO. But how do you understand what is hidden behind these abbreviations and which option should you choose in your case?

As part of today's review, we will consider each of these options for online promotion in detail, highlight its key features, advantages and disadvantages, and tell you in what situations it is worth using this or that option. We will make a brief comparison of possible solutions. The information presented will allow you to navigate the possible methods of website promotion and choose for yourself a combination of solutions that will provide the highest results in a short time in a particular case.

Let's consider all possible options in turn.

SEO promotion: distinctive features

Search Engine Optimization, that is, SEO in literal translation sounds like optimization for search engines. This technique is a set of measures aimed at improving the key parameters of the site. They are designed to improve the quality of its ranking in the search engine, thereby making it more visible to the audience. That is, as part of this work, you need to make sure that each page of your site meets the requirements of search engines. During the indexing of the site, search bots will check all these parameters, and the more they meet the basic standards, the higher your resource will end up in the search results. That is, SEO is the solution that will help your site get to the TOP.

In most cases, the search results are those sites that are promoted through optimization in the search engine. If you enter any query, you will see all the pages that match it on the results page. Statistics show that most users find the goods, services, and information they need on resources that are in the first 3 positions, and a maximum of 10. The lower your page is in the search results, the fewer visitors will visit it.

Running a little ahead, we note that the first block on the search results page will be the block of sites that are promoted using contextual advertising. These are paid solutions that are always marked with the “Advertisement” or “Sponsored” icon. The system will automatically place them above the main search results. This means that even if your site is a leader in SEO promotion, it will not appear on the first line - these positions will be occupied by paid advertising. But this in no way means that search engine optimization should be neglected. This solution has a number of more than significant advantages.

Advantages and disadvantages of SEO

The main advantages characteristic of SEO include:

• Higher levels of trust from the audience. Potential buyers of goods, services, users who are looking for more reliable information for themselves, are quite skeptical about contextual advertising. The thing is that the first positions in the search results go to paid sites, which in itself reduces trust indicators. But if your resource ended up in the TOP thanks to SEO, then you can trust it.
• Obtaining stable and long-term results. Even if you stop promoting your site in search engines for some time, there will be no sharp drop in traffic. You get a result that will last for a fairly long period of time. But you should not completely abandon SEO. That is, the key to success in this case will consist not only in the initial optimization, but also in maintaining the occupied position.
• Relatively low monetary investments, at least in the short term and in comparison with other promotion options. In this case, investments will be systematically distributed over time, which will also optimize financial costs and avoid excessive expenses. If you initially make a high-quality site that meets search engine queries, then its subsequent maintenance will require minimal financial investments.
• Getting stable results. If you managed to move your site to the top of search results, then it will hold leading positions for a long time with a minimal probability of their decline (we repeat, subject to regular replenishment with new content, indicating to search engines that you continue to work on your resource). But it is also important to monitor search engine updates. Perhaps some changes will occur here and it is important for you to respond to them in a timely manner, to ensure that your content meets the new requirements. If you miss this moment, then the site's position will go down, or it will completely fall out of the index. Also, the stability of the results obtained may be negatively affected by the actions of competitors. If they take more successful measures to promote the resource, improve their own technical characteristics, then you will not be able to maintain a high position.

That is, it is safe to say that SEO is a fairly effective way to increase trust from the user audience, attract organic traffic. However, this method also has a number of disadvantages. In particular, one of the most serious "disadvantages" here is that you will be able to notice the first results in a fairly distant future, on average not earlier than in 6 months. You should also understand that in the case of too radical and ill-considered measures during SEO, when using the so-called "black" and "gray" promotion methods, you may face certain sanctions from search engines and cause a decrease in the positions of your resource in the search results.

Let us repeat that search engine algorithms are constantly evolving. They change and improve so that truly high-quality sites that match user queries get to the top. This means that we are talking about an area that will have to be dealt with constantly, studying all the changes and taking appropriate measures to implement them on the site. That is, constant SEO monitoring is very important here. Also, specialists will have to constantly look for new approaches, develop working strategies that will help them achieve good results. It is necessary to constantly monitor the work of competitors, collect current key queries and make appropriate changes to the site. And these works will have to be done even if you initially received the most developed platform.

When is it worth using SEO when promoting websites?

Let's start with the fact that using SEO is a kind of "gold" standard in promoting any Internet sites. This means that this technique should be used in practice by almost all representatives of online business. But still, first of all, it is necessary for those who:

1. Would like to get a stable, reliable result, even in a fairly distant future. That is, it is important for you to understand that no one guarantees instant results in practice in this case.
2. Bets on organic user acquisition. That is, you want most potential buyers to visit your resource through search results. This is the promotion option that is considered free today.
3. Only plans to create their own online representative office. Launching SEO at the site development stage is the best option in terms of efficiency and reliability of results. This way, it will be easiest for you to lay down the most correct structure, create content from scratch that meets all search bot requests. That is, in the end, a minimum of modifications, additional time and effort will be required.
4. Works in a niche where there are currently quite strict restrictions in terms of advertising. This includes the sale of alcohol, certain drugs, such as botulinum toxin, medicine, gambling, cryptocurrency, adult stores, etc.
5. Carries out professional activities in a niche with high competition, large-scale turnover of goods and money. Bright representatives of such a niche will be banking, financial institutions, insurance companies, news, information platforms, etc.

Along with this, rather low SEO indicators are observed when working with one-page sites or small portals. In order for optimization to give good results, it is necessary that the site has at least 15-20 pages. If the indicator is lower, then when performing work it will not be possible to cover the maximum number of key queries, perform effective interlinking, place target queries on landing pages. This is what will significantly complicate the optimization of the resource and will not allow you to correctly perform work related to the optimization of page loading speed. Where the maximum amount of information was posted, the waiting time will always be higher.

What is promotion through SEA/PPC

Search Engine Advertising, which in the abbreviation will sound like SEA in literal translation means “advertising in search engines”. Here, contextual ads will be configured using tools such as Google Adwords or Yandex.Direct. Its display will depend on what request the user entered at a given time, as well as what phrases and geolocation the advertiser initially configured his ad for. Such an ad will be marked with the inscription “Advertisement”. One of the most popular solutions within SEA, which is used by modern marketers is Pay per Click, that is, abbreviated PPC. Literally translated, this sounds like “pay per click”.

This is contextual advertising, which we have already mentioned above, in particular when considering the page with search results. These will be the advertising blocks that are located above the main results. In particular, we are talking about one of the types of online advertising, within the framework of which the site owner pays the search engine for all transitions that will be made by users by clicking on the corresponding ad and, as a result, the transition to the site.

PPC is actively used to attract traffic as quickly as possible and, accordingly, the target audience, increasing the visibility of the resource in search results. It gives good results in practice, but as long as you pay for such transitions. As soon as you stop making payments, your ad will disappear from the thematic search results block.

Advantages and disadvantages of PPC

The main advantages of such a website promotion technique as PPC are worth highlighting:

• The fastest possible results, that is, attracting an audience to the website. In some cases, a day after the launch, the business notes an increased number of applications, orders, and requests. In order to reach the most stable indicators, it will take about 2 weeks on average, but here a lot depends on the chosen strategy.
• The ability to use PPC at different stages of website development. The fact is that contextual advertising does not impose any special requirements on the website itself, unlike SEO, where every element must be brought to perfection. This means that this method can be used even by young projects, those who would like to attract maximum attention to themselves as quickly as possible.
• An ideal solution for promoting seasonal products, goods on sale and many other products. To launch such advertising, you will not have to spend a lot of time and effort on developing a concept. Ads will be displayed in response to a user-entered query, that is, they will be shown to people who are obviously interested in the goods or services provided.
• High efficiency at the stage of testing the demand for new products on the market. If you are thinking about whether to launch a new product or service, then all work can begin with the launch of PPC advertising. If it arouses interest in the audience, if there are clicks on your ad, then you can launch other work, make adjustments to your site. If the result is the opposite of what was expected, then you can safely throw this idea out of consideration, since you have not incurred serious material costs.
• The ability to use geotargeting, that is, to set up an ad display only in the region where your business operates. Thanks to this, advertising costs are minimized, since empty clicks are excluded. When launching PPC, you can set up not only the country, city, but also the district and even the street. This option will be especially useful for local businesses.

Also, one of the significant advantages of the PPC method is that you get an excellent result without doing large-scale work both in the process of developing the advertisement itself and on the site itself. But we want to draw attention to the fact that the effectiveness of even paid advertising will be too reduced if it leads to a low-quality, poorly functioning site. The task of PPC is to attract an audience, but its retention on the site is what the resource itself is responsible for. That is, here we are not talking about “ideality” from the point of view of search engine requirements, but user requests and the convenience of their work on the site pages should be a priority for you.

Are there any disadvantages to this method? Unfortunately, there are. And the most significant “minus” here is that PPC requires a constant investment of money: the strategy will work only when you pay for it. Moreover, mistakes made here can cause a waste of budget. You also need to understand that such a solution is not suitable for all sites. It cannot be used for those portals that work with products prohibited for direct advertising.

Another nuance that we mentioned above is the lower trust rates from the audience compared to the same SEO. Also, we must not forget that a user visiting a site is not an indicator that he will place an order. That is, the transition will be made, the payment will be withdrawn, and you may still not receive the target action. That is, such a click will not bring conversion, but will spend the budget.

Cases when it is worth using PPC

Using PPC in practice will be advisable if:

1. As a business representative, you clearly understand who your target audience is and who you should focus on.
2. You want to get the maximum result in the shortest possible time and are ready to pay for it.
3. You are faced with the task of bringing a new product or service to the market, telling the widest possible segment of the consumer market about it.
4. Your company works with seasonal goods or services.
5. We are talking about promoting a one-page website.

Today, in practice, PPC has been widely used in promoting SaaS projects, online stores, companies providing certain services.

To evaluate the effectiveness of such actions in practice, it is important to focus on cost per click (CPC), that is, the fee per click. There are no fixed prices here, since this parameter will directly depend on the competition within a particular niche, region, time of day, seasonality and many other parameters. Therefore, before launching SEA or PPC directly, it is important to clearly understand whether you will get an effect from it in practice. Otherwise, you simply risk losing money.

What is SEM technology?

Search Engine Marketing, which is abbreviated as SEM, is a digital marketing strategy aimed at increasing the visibility of a resource on the search results page. That is, it is a kind of search engine marketing. But the approaches to implementing SEM among many specialists are radically different from each other. In particular, there are 2 possible options here:

1. Using exclusively paid marketing strategies within SEM. This approach essentially equates this method with contextual advertising.
2. Combination of organic and paid promotion methods. That is, with this approach we get the formula SEM=SEO+РРС.

Each marketer decides for himself which option to use in practice, but still the second method will be the most effective. But in any case, SEM will include the use of various strategies, practices aimed at attracting the target audience to your portal in order to obtain conversion actions. As part of the implementation, an analysis of search queries entered by users is very often performed. Attention is paid to optimizing the structure of the resource, its content, as well as developing advertising campaigns that will give the maximum result in practice. That is, if we talk directly about the key elements of SEM, then the following points should be highlighted:

• Analysis of key queries that users enter when searching for a particular product, service, as well as those phrases that your closest competitors use in their own content. That is, in this case, it is important to get a set of relevant queries that will form the basis for subsequent promotion.
• Optimization of text and graphic content. It is important to obtain output material that would meet the requirements of search engines, and would also be useful and easy to study for the target audience.
• Efficient management of advertising campaigns. Each new project must be very carefully planned, regularly monitored for effectiveness, promptly making the necessary adjustments and additions. This is the only way to ensure higher visibility of the site, as well as guaranteed traffic attraction.
• Regular collection of analytical data, generation of reports. You must understand how effective the decisions you made turned out to be in practice. This is what will allow you to improve strategies, get the maximum result at the output within the optimized budget.
• Adaptation of the site, as well as advertising strategies to behavioral models. In the event that user actions and interests change, you must adapt to this as quickly as possible in order not to lose orders.

That is, the use of SEM in practice is — this is what will provide the business with better visibility in search results, will help to build effective interaction with the target audience, which will ultimately have a positive effect on the overall effectiveness of business promotion.

Advantages and disadvantages of SEM

The first thing we would like to draw your attention to is that in this case, under SEM we mean a combination of 2 key methods, namely SEO and PPC. In this case, you will be able to see a number of key advantages of this solution:

1. Using paid and free channels to attract the target audience will contribute to a more noticeable increase in traffic, but at the same time the costs for this will be significantly reduced.
2. Achieving the desired results is mostly observed in a fairly short period of time, which is due to the combination of two key methods: SEO and PPC.
3. Ensuring good recognition of the site, forming a positive brand reputation, which is ensured by increasing the position of the resource in search results. In parallel with this, the level of trust on the part of the user audience will also increase, which will have a positive effect on such a parameter as the trustworthiness of the site.

Also, an undoubted advantage of this technology will be that specialists will be able to select such methods that will be distinguished by the highest efficiency in a particular situation. That is, there are many options for building a strategy for promotion.

The practical use of such a combined technique as SEM also has a number of disadvantages. In particular, it is unlikely that all these works will be carried out by one person. The fact is that here you will need to involve an SEO specialist, a marketer, someone who can debug the site. As a result, you will get a good result, but the material costs, in particular for labor, will be quite significant. Also, the more strategies are used in the work, the more strict and multi-level control will be required here. Moreover, the influence of certain indicators on the effectiveness of site development will be quite difficult to track, which in the end will not always allow you to make the most appropriate and balanced decision.

That is, in order to decide on the most suitable strategy, you first need to carefully weigh all the "Pros" and "Cons" SEM.

What about SMM promotion?

Social Media Marketing, also known as SMM, is website promotion in social networks. This trend is gaining popularity due to the fact that more and more people today use these platforms not only for communication, but also for purchasing goods and services. This means that their capabilities in business promotion cannot be underestimated.

Evaluate the main advantages of using SMM in practice:

1. Gaining access to a very wide audience, as well as virtually unlimited opportunities for targeting. Today, such platforms have gathered a multi-million audience, among which there will definitely be people interested in your products and services. Moreover, you will have tools at your disposal that allow you to build competent segmentation and focus directly on your target audience.
2. A lot of opportunities for interaction with potential customers. You can quickly answer user questions, react to comments, express your own opinion, showing yourself as an expert in this niche, which in itself will help increase loyalty and form stable interest.
3. The ability to create content that can go viral, passing from one user to another. This can be realized if you manage to create really high-quality content that will be very useful or interesting to the audience.

Are there any disadvantages to SMM? Of course, there are and they must be taken into account in the work process. In particular, in this case, you will also need to implement a fairly large amount of work, which should subsequently be performed on an ongoing basis. That is, it will be necessary to regularly prepare new materials, focusing on the interests and current trends existing in the market. It will also be very important to constantly monitor the effectiveness of the events you have launched, and promptly respond to changes. It is also very important to monitor the comments and reviews of customers in order to smooth out the negative as quickly as possible, and thank them for their purchases. This is what will ultimately contribute to increasing loyalty and stimulating new orders.

That is, the main difficulty of SMM is that you will have to do a very large amount of work, as well as experiment with different strategies in order to get good results in the end.

Getting to know the SMO website promotion technique

The last technology that we will consider in today's review as a tool for promoting a business website, its products and services on the market is SMO, namely social media optimization. It can rightfully be called one of the elements of SMM, since we are talking about optimizing a website for social networks. In this case, we are talking about holding a number of events within your resource so that it can attract users from social networks and hold their attention.

In this case, we are talking about using the following technologies:

• preparing unique and high-quality content that social network users could share in their accounts;
• each text should be interesting enough to stimulate the audience to discuss, express their own opinions;
• adding internal linking, which will help retain the audience's attention and move it to other pages of the site, thereby increasing the time spent on your resource;
• installing social network buttons, which will allow the audience to immediately like, repost, comment, subscribe and perform all these actions that would be typical for regular social networks;
• connecting community widgets, commenting systems, creating polls, surveys and others social widgets, posting links to other pages with similar information.

We would like to draw your attention to the fact that SMO is not SEO or SMM. In the first case, the key difference will be that you no longer need to strive to ensure that your site is at the top of search results. Moreover, you will not need to optimize it for key queries. Here, a completely different goal is pursued - to organize traffic from social networks. But in any case, if you organize everything correctly, if you can get stable traffic, then this will be positively assessed by search bots and will have a positive effect on the site's position in search results. The difference with SMM here is that there is no need to engage in promotion in social networks. That is, SMO - this is a kind of mix of both methods.

Let's sum it up

All the technologies we talked about in today's review give good results in practice. They can improve the visibility of a website in search engines, increase brand awareness and audience loyalty, increase reach, and along with this, the number of conversions and traffic indicators to the website. Therefore, it is important for you, as business representatives, to navigate very well in all this diversity and choose the solution that will be most suitable in your case. That is, you should know the distinctive features of each method, its advantages, disadvantages, areas of application, and then compare them with the specifics of your own business and the goals that you set for it.

In most cases, the best result in practice is given by a combination of methods. This is what will allow you to scale the advantages of each option, but at the same time minimize the disadvantages. As a result, you get a universal solution that can fully meet your expectations.

But in any case, the implementation of these ideas should be approached as comprehensively and professionally as possible, paying maximum attention and effort directly to planning and preparatory work. Here you will have to collect maximum information, including about your target audience, competitors, those key queries that are used to search for information, goods, services. This will require quite a lot of time and effort from specialists. But there is one simple way to optimize this process and get the necessary information as quickly and easily as possible.

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