Discover With Semalt The Techniques To Optimize Your Marketing Strategy: SEO, SEA, SEM, SMO, And SL  

Do you ever think back to the early days of the Internet? The modems, the slow connection, and especially the hundreds of advertising pages that pop up at the slightest click. At the time, these pop-ups were not just ads from dubious sites but ads from very serious advertisers. Then, brands gradually understood that they had gone too far and that the web, a space without borders, did not give them the right to do anything anyhow. With time and experience, brands have structured their approach (frequency, type of content, targeting) and have opted for more discretion. This has resulted in the birth of PUSH marketing tactics. 

Indeed, PUSH marketing consists in addressing potential buyers directly to promote a product or content. But in turn, PUSH tactics have matured and Internet users are saturated with advertising and commercial messages. As a result, brands must once again rethink their strategy to ensure their brand and content visibility. 

This is how 'PULL marketing' has gradually become more and more popular. Indeed, PULL marketing consists in highlighting a product, a brand, and its content on the web in order to attract potential buyers. That being said, "SMO, SEO, SEA and SEM" are acronyms that you should take more into account in this field.

So, are you now thinking about referencing your marketing strategy? If so, you don't have to worry anymore! Indeed, structures such as Semalt, will help you optimize your marketing strategy with a better SEO tool: the SEO Personal Dashboard. 

Moreover, in the following section of our article, you will have all the details on SEO, SEA, SEM, SMO, and SL techniques that will accompany you in your webmarketing actions so that you can optimize your marketing strategy. 

Now, let's start our topic of the day with this: 

SEA stands for Search Engine Advertising. Indeed, SEA consists in sponsoring a search result. It is also called paid search. For example, if you are looking for a new product and you type the name of the product on Google, you will see various results. The first ones you'll see are labeled ads. This means that the brand managers who appear in those ads have paid for their brand to appear in every search for what you want on Google within a specific geographic area.

Indeed, for the brands, the interest is twofold: they are more visible to a prospect ready to buy, and therefore increase their chances of making a sale. The second interest is to increase the traffic to their website while promoting the visibility of this same site via SEO. In addition, the use of a good SEO tool such as the DSD will make your website more visible on search engines.

To get a good result from your website you need to have an SEO strategy in place.  Indeed, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. For each page of each website in the world, Google assigns a score based on in-house algorithms. Thus, if your score is good on the search made by an Internet user, you will be at the top of the list because a page that comes out at the top of the list of the search integrates all the good practices to get a good score. This means that the searched keywords appear many times on the page and that the page contains external links. 

Also, the page is edited and the name of the images contains the searched keywords. All of these elements make it easier for Google's robots to read the page and confirm its relevance when someone searches for content in relation to a keyword. 

Finally, the fact that a page is frequently seen and visited also favors the score given by the Google algorithm. This is why an SEA operation boosting the traffic of a page has a positive effect on the SEO of this same page.

Now that you have understood what SEA and SEO are, it is easier to explain what SEM is. Literally, SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing and in concrete terms, it refers to activities that aim to boost organic (SEO) or paid (SEA) visibility. Indeed, SEM combines the ability to highlight a product to those who are actively looking for this type of product; and the ability to advertise to a very targeted audience. If this all sounds clearer to you, it is really only the second part of the job. 

So, optimizing a website and its pages to appear at the top of searches is a good strategy, given the rise of inbound marketing. But you still need to know what keywords you are using to optimize your site. You've all heard of, or used, tools that can tell you what keyword combinations are hot from a starting proposition. You may also use tools that show you how your site is performing on specific keywords. 

The problem is that all this implies knowing at the beginning which lexical field you want to direct your company's SEM strategy towards, and this depends on your company's positioning. So there is a lot of thinking and work to be done upstream by companies to understand their consumers and understand their role towards them. 

Therefore, companies must learn to listen and analyze their discussions, anticipate new trends, understand how they are perceived, and act quickly.

If, for example, a beverage company sets up a listening system on summer consumption habits thanks to a Social Listening solution, it will be able to follow in real-time the evolution of practices. It will also be able to see trends emerging and will be able to support this growing demand by proposing recipes or by creating a dedicated page on its website to capture part of the traffic generated by people searching for these keywords.

It can also position itself to sponsor these emerging terms that should be more affordable. This monitoring can also allow the company to discover that consumers have a different usage than the one it could imagine.

You already know everything about SEA, SEO, SEM, and how SL allows you to optimize the whole, but what about SMO? Indeed, SMO is the latest strategy born. It stands for Social Media Optimization. It is the equivalent of SEM but applies exclusively to social media. 

SMO consists of all the activities that promote the visibility of content, of a page, a site or a brand on social networks. It is also based on natural referencing (SEO) and paid referencing (SEA).

Content shared on social media is not scanned by Google robots. Therefore, posts on social networks will not come up if a user types a series of keywords on Google. However, the visibility of these contents is done in three ways:

SEA applied to social networks consists of paying a social network to showcase content to an audience that is not part of your original audience. Social networks allow for incredibly precise targeting based on the interests of the accounts followed and the publications of a user. But, it's up to the company to know which audience it wants to target and what content it wants to promote to succeed in its social media ATS campaign. 

It is therefore essential for the company to carry out a survey before launching its campaign to identify its target audience precisely and thus determine the best content to offer to it.

Don't you know which acquisition levers to choose between SEO, SEA, SEM, and SMO? It is not easy to understand and evaluate the potential of each lever. Each company will have different needs, depending on its positioning, budget, and industry. One thing is certain: SEO, SEA, SEM, and SMO are complementary! However, a global SEO strategy will integrate all these levers to obtain satisfactory results. 

In addition, to best manage the resources and opportunities available to you, it is advisable to choose a multidisciplinary agency whose mission will be to implement a coherent strategy and create synergies. 

Indeed, Semalt with its SEO Personal Dashboard tool accompanies all companies to improve their visibility on search engines. Thus, trusting Semalt is to have the success you want! 

In short, if SEO is one of the most interesting levers for acquiring traffic and leads according to the majority of webmarketing managers interviewed, it is also one of the most important levers for a marketing strategy that we have just taught you. 

Indeed, whether you want to run paid or organic campaigns; whether you want to push content or optimize the visibility of your brand; it is important to perform a listening via a Social Listening solution beforehand. This will allow you to understand how people express themselves in order to appropriate the codes of your audience and integrate them into your optimization strategy. 

Using the same language code as your target audience increases your chances of attracting people who are looking for information via your PULL strategy and holding the attention of those who will be exposed to your message via your PUSH strategy. 

Do you need help? Semalt can help you implement your digital strategy and support your web marketing actions with our DSD SEO tool! 

Feel free to share your concerns with us in the comments!