In today's marketing climate it is essential to have good quality search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimisation (SEO). If you want to be seen in google you need to take this very seriously. By using use the US as a guide, by 2021 mobile ecommerce will account for 53.3% of all retail sales. The importance of SEO and SEM are growing at an exponential rate, so let me break them down and explain how you can profit from this crazy marketing tool.
First let's start by defining the two. SEM is strictly paid search engine marketing. It is easy to see (often accompanied with the "Ads" tag), and it will take priority over organic marketing. SEO is the organic marketing that creates the hierarchy on google searches. This is dictated by things like key words, the relevance in your URL to what people are searching and metadata.
Here is an example of what SEM looks like on a laptop vs a mobile. When I search for a new wallet the highlighted areas are paid SEM ads that Google has prioritised above what the organic searches. As you can see the SEM takes up the entire screen on the mobile layout, and as we know, people love convenience so we can conclude the links further down the page will be largely ignored.
An example of SEO can be seen using the exact same search. The Iconic have structured their keywords and branding to include popular search terms when looking to buy a wallet. Using keywords like "Men's wallets", "Online", "leather and cloth" and "Free and fast shipping" they have cleared the hoops google sets to become the top search link.
A good breakdown of what SEO needs to become ranked highly by google can be seen in Mazlow's Hierarchy of SEO Needs. Here you can see the importance in each step of the SEO process.
As you can see some of these steps luckily aren't that hard! Having a website that actually answers the needs of your consumer is a very basic way of increasing your rankings. Not to mention designing a customer friendly interface is a great way to help people stay interactive with your website and hopefully purchase your product.
Let me know how you interact with SEM and SEO, I find myself ignoring any options labelled "Ads" because they have paid to be there instead of earning the rights to be.
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