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by Heidi Miget on 12.21.2009 in Interactive Marketing 0

With some of the fastest growing advertising real estate, the Web has become the new outlet for marketers and advertisers to reach target audiences and drive measurable results. But if you’re not in the business everyday, Internet marketing can be a virtual alphabet soup of acronyms.

We’re here to break down some of the most commonly used online marketing terms and give you the resources to understand what Web opportunities make sense for your business.

SEM or Search Engine Marketing most often confuses people since it is frequently defined differently by many sources. According to some, SEM refers only to paid Internet advertising, such as the sponsored links you see at the top and right side of the search engine listings. More commonly, the term SEM means Internet marketing methods – for example SEO and PPC opportunities which we will discuss below.

The two most popular forms of advertising that fall under SEM are PPC (pay-per-click) and SEO (search engine optimization). The difference between these two forms of marketing is that PPC acts as an advertising medium – where the advertiser pays for each click that brings a consumer to the site – while SEO is the process of optimizing a website to rank in results listings where visitor clicks are free. These are often called organic results because they are generated by relevance to the search word.

Each interactive marketing method requires a specific set up process to generate true results. With PPC, an account is set up through the advertising platform and it’s possible to have an ad running that will draw visitors to a website within just a few hours of launch (depending on the size and structure of the campaign). On the other hand, for SEO, changes must be made to a business’ website to improve its rank among search results – a process that can take weeks and even months to complete and generate quantifiable results.

So as a potential advertiser you might be considering the bottom line and scheduling. In which case, PPC seems to be the clear choice, right?  Well, it depends. When a client comes to Brighton for online marketing capabilities, the decision to participate in PPC, SEO or both is something that’s best decided on a case by case scenario. The outreach, which will produce the most results, may depend on the client’s industry, advertising budgets or the anticipated goals and objectives for the campaign.

Taking more time to achieve its desired results, SEO is not a guaranteed fix. However, the top organic results are more often trusted and draw in a larger percentage of a search engine’s clicks than the PPC results, which is why SEO shouldn’t be excluded from consideration due to the effort it requires.

On the other hand, while PPC may not have the credibility that SEO is known for, it produces additional values that make it an important part of Internet Marketing campaigns. As I mentioned previously, PPC offers instantaneous results when compared to SEO. This is ideal for a quick launch campaign involving a sales event, a new store opening or if the advertiser is looking for immediate presence on the Internet. In addition, PPC offers presence on hundreds or thousands of keywords, while SEO is normally intended for more refined searches with fewer targeted keywords.

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