In this article you will find the different types of SEO (SEM, SEA, SEO, SMO). You will find an explanation for each of them. This will help you understand what is behind these acronyms.
There are two main types of SEO, natural and paid. Both have the same goal, but they do not achieve it in the same way.
This goal is to acquire traffic for your website. SEO will remain the main pillar to increase the number of visitors to your site. If you sell any product or service, then it will be one of the main engines of your growth.
1. Why is SEO essential?
You may have made the most beautiful website in the world, with a revolutionary product… If you don’t have visitors, you won’t have buyers. The main search engine, the one that overwhelmingly dominates the market is Google.
He leaves crumbs to other engines, that’s why Webmasters focus a lot on him. But anyway, if you optimize your SEO for Google, it will also be good for other search engines.
The SEO marketing agency will help your business by optimizing the website to rank higher in the search engine results. When a user types a keyword in their search field, an algorithm is set in motion to provide the most relevant results. This same user will generally focus on the first results. Indeed, it will not go through the first 3 pages.
It is therefore essential to be on the first page, if possible in the first 3 results. You can also consult the article on the best positions in Google which is very informative. You will be able to know the click-through rates by position.
Different types of SEO (SEM, SEA, SEO, SMO)
Now, you will discover the different types of SEO (SEM, SEA, SEO, SMO). Indeed, there are four main acronyms which will be presented below. They mainly consist of two categories, paid and natural. The two best known are probably SEA and SEO which you will find below.
1. Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
This is not the best known, SEO SEM which means “Search Engine Marketing” is actually a grouping of the three methods below, SEA, SEO and SMO.
To put it simply, it is all the practices that will allow you to increase the visibility of your website on search engines. Initially, we were talking about SEO and SEA, but now we can also include social networks. Even if this is still disputed by some, because for them it does not make sense to add these. Indeed, the methods are different between the SEO + SEA pair and the SMO as you will see below.
2. Search Engine Advertising (SEA)
When we talk about SEA SEO, it means “Search Engine Advertising”, if you translate it is like talking about search engine advertising. It is therefore a method that allows you to buy advertising space to find yourself at the top of an engine’s results when a user inserts a keyword.
For example, these are the ads that we see in the Google search engine. They are labeled “ad” and are placed above the natural referencing results. It is therefore an excellent way to be positioned on the first page of a search engine on a specific keyword.
On the other hand, the disadvantage is that it is paying. It is an auction system, so the more the keyword is requested the higher the price.
This can range from a few cents to several tens of euros per click. The best known is the Google program called AdWords . It will allow you to display your ads on specific keywords in search engine results and on AdSense program partner sites. The idea of this referencing is therefore to pay for its visibility.
Read Also: Small Business SEO: 10 Really Effective Strategies
3. SEO referencing
It is certainly the best known of the different types of SEO (SEM, SEA, SEO, SMO). Natural referencing makes it possible to obtain traffic without paying, it is about optimizing your content to make search engines understand the object of the latter. You have to structure your site to get higher results. It is called SEO referencing for “Search Engine Optimization”.
Unlike SEA which allows immediate results, you pay if you are shown in the search engine results, SEO takes time. Indeed, it is a robot specific to each search engine which will browse your pages and your articles to determine the keywords which emerge from them and assign a ranking to your articles compared to those of your competitors.
It is therefore necessary to set up a content policy, respecting a certain number of criteria for the writing of each page or each article (title, length of the content, url, links, images…). You also need to get links from other sites or shares on social networks to increase your notoriety.
It often takes several months to obtain a good natural referencing. The huge advantage is that it is stable over time. In other words, you will have regular visitor traffic thanks to it, unlike SEA.
With the SEA, if you stop paying, you will no longer have visits, because your ads will no longer be displayed. It is thus considered that it is interesting to start with SEA to generate traffic at the start of the site, until the SEO is set up and your articles are referenced and allow the acquisition of natural traffic.
SEO has following subtypes as:
Natural SEO
Natural referencing, also called organic referencing, brings together all the techniques to optimize the positioning of a site in the results of search engines. All these methods are found under the acronym of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). In natural referencing, we will speak of natural (or organic) links, that is to say links from the heart of the engine (provided by the relevance algorithm) without the intervention of an advertising or monetary system.
Local SEO
If you have a site whose activity depends largely on a local business, you cannot ignore a local SEO strategy . A good referencing in Google Maps will be in particular a necessary passage via the services Google + Local and Google Addresses. These free tools are very interesting for SEO (display of local results at the top of Google results pages) and for Internet users who will precisely locate your business on a map and will be able to obtain a link to the access map.
Paid SEO
Paid referencing , also called sponsored or non-organic referencing, refers to all actions aimed at positioning one’s site at the top of Google by buying sponsored links. These methods are found under the term SEA, Search Engine Advertising. These are all commercial advertisements placed on search engines mainly with Google Adwords commercial referencing.
International SEO
In the case of a website abroad, if you want to position it well on the international market, you will work on the international referencing of this site. How to set up an international SEO strategy and act on multilingual sites? The actions to be implemented will vary according to the linguistic zones and the local targets: thus you will not reference a site in English for an Italian audience for example. The simple transposition (mirror referencing) of a site from one language to another is not sufficient to hope to position itself in this market.
Read Also: Traffico Anomalo Google Secrets To Know
4. Social Media Optimization (SMO)
We can say that it is the latest arrival concerning the types of referencing (SEM, SEA, SEO, SMO). Indeed, we can approach SEO SMO which means Social Media Optimization. If we translate it, it means “Optimization on social networks”.
Here, it is very easy to understand. It is all the methods that allow you to develop your visibility through the various social networks. We can cite the main social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, YouTube …
We can also note that it is possible on these social networks to apply the paid method to position themselves in advertising spaces (Facebook Ads or Twitter Ads for example). In this case it is therefore a kind of SEA (the latter concerning search engines) combined with SMO. But this is another story.
READ MORE: HOW SMS MARKETING CAN IMPROVE MARKETING ROI
