Leslye Schumacher is a Founding Partner with Vici. Leslye’s background in media spans 25 years and includes working for both large and mid-size television, radio and newspaper companies. She has held positions in sales, management, marketing and NTR. Leslye has extensive experience in training salespeople and coaching managers. She is Google Analytics Advanced Certified, a Certified Radio Marketing Consultant and a Certified Sales Talent Analyst, having assessed over 10,000 media salespeople and managers. Leslye was the Vice President Of Talent Services for The Center For Sales Strategy before going on to start TalentQ Consulting and then Vici Media.
I think Search Engine Optimization is one of the hardest things to understand and even harder to explain to small business owners. Now, Google is making all kinds of change to their Search Engine Results Page (SERP), making it more confusing than ever.
I’ve learned to run things through my “Mom Test.” If I can explain a digital product in a way that my Mom understands, I know that it will make sense to an advertiser. Don’t get me wrong, my Mother is not stupid – far from it, she is one of the smartest women I know (I’d say that even if she didn’t read my blog posts). But, she is not a digital native and is not someone who has a lot of marketing experience. So here is my “Mom Tested” explanation that you can use to explain SEO and Pay-Per-Click advertising (as it relates to Google) and all of the recent Google changes.
First, let’s get our terms straight.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and SEO is a TYPE OF Search Engine Marketing (SEM) just as Pay-Per-Click is a type of Search Engine Marketing. But they are very different.
SEO is the process of improving and promoting a website to increase the number of visitors the site receives from search engines (as in Google). When a company (like Vici) does a SEO campaign for a business we are doing things both on the website itself and by creating links to the website, in order to promote that website to Google so that the business appears higher in the organic rankings for keywords relating to that business.
Pay-Per-Click, which is also referred to as Paid Search or Google AdWords, are the text ads that appear primarily on the Google Search Engine Results Page. You pay when someone clicks on the ad. Most of our clients have found that Pay-Per-Click is not efficient for a local business and that Keyword Targeting of display ads works much better.
Sometimes, you might see a Results Page that looks like the one below which includes the Google “Snack Pack” listings. These are not paid ads. They are organic listings that Google offers when it thinks you are looking for specific locations. Again, like organic search engine results, these cannot be purchased – you have to have good SEO to appear.
And if you Google a specific business you might see something completely different which is the Google “Knowledge Graph” shown below. These are not paid ads either. They are organic and stem again from having good SEO.
What does all this mean to the average local business? How do you know if you need Search Engine Optimization (SEO) help
If not, then my Mom says you need an SEO campaign!
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