Your Guide to Affordable Search Engine Marketing

What is Search Engine Marketing?

Search engine marketing, or SEM for short, is a digital marketing technique widely used to improve on-page SEO factors for websites. The end goal of said techniques is to increase search engine rankings and visibility.

While SEM includes a wide range of techniques, splitting these into two categories will help simplify your introduction to SEM. The two categories are paid and organic.

Paid search engine marketing covers techniques like Pay Per Click and paid search (i.e. Google Ads). On the other hand, organic SEM refers to digital content strategy and search engine optimisation techniques. These are just a few examples from the two categories; the actual list is much longer and a bit exhaustive, so we thought we’d spare you!

This post won’t discuss paid SEM techniques but instead focuses on organic, affordable search engine marketing techniques.

Affordable Search Engine Marketing Techniques

Hiring an SEO specialist in-house or an external marketing agency can often be an expense that many businesses cannot commit to. This is a real shame, especially when businesses like yours have exceptional services but fail to compete online.

That doesn’t mean you as a business shouldn’t spend some time implementing more affordable search engine marketing techniques. This way, when the time comes, you will have an optimised foundation to build upon.

So, as previously discussed, here are some examples of affordable organic techniques to help you on your journey of SEM discovery!

1. SEO Best Practice – Optimise your content

This is every search engine marketers bread and butter. One of the first things highlighted in a site audit or on top of the priority list with uploading new content online. After all, we can’t all purely rely on quality external SEO factors for online visibility and search engine ranking. Don’t get us wrong; they’re also significant factors for ranking online, but they can require a budget or need precious time dedicated toward a consistent strategy.

SEO best practices can vary slightly depending on your keyword intent or target audience, but the basics are often consistent. We’re talking:

• SEO Title and Meta Description

The SEO title and meta description should summarise the page service or content and include a CTA. It should also include your target keyword, often at the beginning. Oh, and make sure it’s 70 characters or lower, as Google will cut some of the SEO title off!

• Heading and Paragraph elements

You have heading tags within your site content (h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6) and the paragraph tag. Your targeted keyword should appear at least 2 or 3 times throughout the content, within at least one heading, and within the paragraph tags.

• Keyword in the slug

The keyword should always be in the post or page slug. Think of it like you’re trying to make it easy for search engines to crawl the content and rank it for the optimised keyword.

• Alt text

If you embed or attach any images to your site content, make sure that you add the keyword into the image alt text.

2. Reduce Page Load Speed

We’re all in the same boat, fighting to compete with our target audience’s attention! Which seems to be getting more difficult as the years go by. So having a quick loading website is not only something that keeps Google happy but keeps your users happy too.

Some factors to consider when improving load speed:

• File and image compression.
• Reduce CSS, Javascript and HTML file sizes.
• Reduce redirections.
• Only upload optimised media.
• Improve server response time.

Your website performance can be thoroughly analysed in a digital marketing audit; this includes the speed of your site and more personalised actions you can take to reduce load times.

HubSpot also has a great article about this; take a look!

3. Effective Internal Linking.

For affordable search engine marketing, internal link building is possibly one of the most cost-effective and simplistic methods. Internal linking refers to the process of connecting your website content together, effectively sharing SEO juice between multiple pages.

For Google, internal linking will definitely draw their attention. As Google spiders/bots crawl pages for authority and content relevancy for users, their bots love to see good (easy to follow) internal links.

For your users, internal linking offers them the opportunity to find related topics and improve their overall user experience. At the same time, it offers ample and efficient opportunities for your users to either learn more, convert, or become advocates for your brand and position you as an authority within your industry.

It’s an essential instrument in any SEO’s toolbox that drastically increases the effectiveness of search engine marketing strategy.

Get Started with Search Engine Marketing

These three SEM techniques are sure to get your SEO engines warmed up, and will 100% put your website in Google’s good books (helping to improve your SERP position).

Interested in search engine marketing services? Our team of digital marketing specialists will work to improve your website visibility and rankings with our SEO management services.

Sound interesting? Why not send us a message today!