WHATS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SEO AND SEM?

Here’s the short answer:

SEO is the process of getting your website ranked organically (or naturally) within the search engine results pages (like Google). You cannot pay Google to rank organically. The results are based on their algorithms.

SEM is paying to have your website show up in the results. This can include paying for ads in Google, in directories, or on social platforms.

For a more detailed answer, and to find which is better (or right for your business) keep reading below.

SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING (SEM) & PAY-PER-CLICK

The online marketing world has changed dramatically in recent years. Google Ads is one of the platforms driving this change. Google Ads is a paid advertising or pay-per-click (PPC) service offered by Google. It is one of the most effective methods of paid advertising online.

Pay-per-click (PPC) is a type of internet marketing service in which the advertiser pays a fee each time their ad is clicked. Once clicked, the ad directs the searcher to the advertiser’s website. The goal of the advertiser is to get the searcher to perform a predetermined action.

Common Actions Include:

• Filling out a lead form
• Completing a sale
• Signing up for a newsletter

PPC is a way to buy targeted visitors to your website, rather than gaining visits through organic methods.

Primarily based on keyword bids and other relevancy factors, ads will be displayed on the top or on the side of the organic results. Through their search query, searchers reveal their intent to purchase.

Using the results and insights from Google Ads and Google Analytics, advertisers are then able to measure the effectiveness of their ads and the quality of the traffic. They can then refine their ads and make adjustments as necessary.

If Google Ads is a platform you would rather leave up to the experts, then visit our Search Engine Marketing & Pay-Per-Click page to inquire about pricing and to learn more.

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION (SEO)

What exactly does SEO mean?

Search engine optimization is the process of designing, writing, and coding your website so that there is a better chance that your website will appear at the top of search engine results page, like Google, for your desired keywords. Ultimately, it is a way for your website to get organic traffic from the search engine results page on major search engines – for free!

How it works:

The simple version: Google reads the content on your site (and other elements) and determines what keywords your website should rank for.

For the techies: Search engines used web crawlers (sometimes referred to as spiders or bots) to crawl the web and build an index of web pages, files, news stories, pictures, videos, and other media. When someone types in a search query, the search engine scours its database and returns only the results it deems to be the most relevant. It then presents the results in the form of a list, ranked from most relevant to least relevant. Each search engine has their own algorithms that use mathematical equations which contain hundreds of variables to determine the relevance and popularity of web pages.

Our team uses proven and ethical search engine optimization strategies to get your website ranked in the top positions for your industry keyword phrases.

Are you ready to start driving more traffic to your website? Visit our Search Engine Optimization page to inquire about pricing and to learn more.

What’s better? SEO or SEM

There’s a simple answer to this, it depends on what your goals are.

With SEM you have a lot more control over your campaign. You control your budget, keywords that you want to be found for, geographic area to target, immediacy of rankings, among other things. The down side is that this platform is becoming more competitive so you will have to have a regular budget to accomplish your goals. Once you stop paying for SEM, you will no longer show up in the search engines.

With SEO you may have to be patient to see results. Writing good content, generating back links to that content, and getting reviews takes time. Not to mention that you are competing with everyone in your industry as well as local directories for that first page spot. Working with a professional to complete proper keyword research and selecting the right keywords to target will help you to move in the right direction. And once you do achieve results, the traffic tends to convert higher than SEM and your website rankings will generally be maintained for a period of time. SEO tends to be a long term strategy.

We usually recommend implementing both strategies at the same time to achieve maximum results.

Are you looking for a great SEO company in Coquitlam to work with?

Longevity Graphics specializes in SEO and SEM for small to medium businesses specifically in the trades, professional services, and health services industries.

With search engines like Google dominating the online user experience, it’s crucial for you to cater to the top platforms. To increase traffic, Longevity Graphics uses SEO and SEM techniques to help your website rank for relevant searches (keywords used by the person searching). This is done through organic keyword use, as well as paid avenues such as Google Ads. When used in tandem, these techniques ensure more online success.

Contact Longevity Graphics today for a free one hour consultation, and learn how SEO can make a difference in your business. Call 778-229-5383.

Have you heard of the term low-hanging fruit? It’s one of those common business clichés that people use to describe activities that would yield fast, easy results. In sales, this may include up-selling your current clients. Does such an activity exist in the digital marketing realm? It sure does! It’s called remarketing.

When properly executed, it can deliver 10x greater returns on investment compared to ads served to cold audiences. So, how exactly does it all work?

“Remarketing lets you show ads to people who’ve visited your website. When people leave your website without buying anything, for example, remarketing helps you reconnect with them by showing relevant ads across their different devices.” – Google

If you’ve ever been browsing online and then noticed the product you were shopping for following you around on various platforms, then you’ve seen the effects of remarketing in action.

Benefits of Remarketing

Remarketing is a powerful online marketing technique as it allows you to stay connected with your target audience, even after they leave your website. By presenting your ads to visitors as they browse other parts of the web, you are gaining brand exposure, becoming more recognizable, and making people more likely to purchase.

The main benefits include:

• Large-scale reach of Google
• Access to people who are most likely to buy
• Create marketing lists to achieve a specific goal

Understanding your Goals

There are three kinds of remarketing campaigns that you might want to run.

1. Aimed at people who did not take a certain action on a page
2. Targeting those who made it to the checkout process, but did not complete their purchase
3. For people who have not seen a page that you would like them to view

So, what action do you want your potential customer to take when presented your campaign? It is important to understand what your end goal is prior to setting up your campaign.

Getting Started

Follow the instructions below to successfully set up your own campaign.

1. Create a Google AdWords account
2. Add Remarketing Tags to your website
3. Create a Remarketing list
4. Create or use an existing campaign type that is supported
5. Select your audience

If you want the guidance of an internet marketing expert, set up a FREE 1-Hour Consultation to get started today! Longevity Graphics specializes in search engine marketing. Click here to view our current Internet Marketing Clients. 

PPC Marketing Coquitlam

The online marketing world has changed dramatically in recent years. Google AdWords is one of the platforms creating this change. Google AdWords is a paid advertising or pay-per-click (PPC) service offered by Google. It is one of the most effective methods of paid advertising online.

Google AdWords is used by organizations of all sizes. These organizations all have one thing in common. They want to reach a large number of people who search for information, products, and services online.

What is PPC Marketing Coquitlam?

PPC stands for pay-per-click. It is a type of internet marketing in which the advertiser pays a fee each time their ad is clicked. When clicked, the ad directs the searcher to a landing page. The goal of the advertiser is to get the searcher to perform a predetermined task. Generally, this task is to purchase a product or service. Essentially, PPC is a way to buy visits to your website, rather than obtaining the visits through organic methods.

How Does PPC Marketing Coquitlam Work?

Let’s take a look at the image above. In this example, I searched for Website Design Coquitlam in Google. As you can see, a PPC ad for Longevity Graphics appeared at the top of the page above the organic results. This ad includes the same information as the typical Google search results. Additionally, it includes:

• Address
• Phone Number
• Hours of Operation
• Highlighted Services

PPC Marketing is Good for Everyone

Searchers – Research indicates that searchers click on paid search ads more than any other form of digital marketing. This means that people don’t mind being advertised to through this medium, as long as the products and services that appear actually fit their needs.

Advertisers – Through their search query, searchers reveal their intent to purchase. Using the results from Google AdWords and Google Analytics, advertisers are able to measure the quality of traffic that results from PPC clicks. They can then refine their ads to achieve different results.

Search engines – PPC Marketing allows search engines to cater to searchers and advertisers simultaneously. As long as search engines continue to display relevant ads to searchers and provide measurable information to advertisers, then both parties will remain happy.

PPC Keyword Research

Conducting keyword research can be a very time-consuming task. However, it is incredibly important as your entire PPC campaigns are built around the keywords you choose. An effective PPC keyword list should be:

• Relevant
• Exhaustive
• Expansive

If Google AdWords and PPC Keyword Research are tasks you would rather leave up to the professionals, then get in contact with Longevity Graphics for your PPC Marketing Coquitlam services, today! We provide a FREE 1-Hour Consultation so you can learn about the services we offer.

FREE 1-Hour Consultation!

Are you thinking about starting a business in Port Coquitlam? We’ve gathered some resources to help you get started.

Visit the City of Port Coquitlam Website

The City of Port Coquitlam  website is a great place to begin when thinking about starting a business in Port Coquitlam. The website has many resources that will help you, prior to ‘opening your doors’.  Click here to visit the City of Port Coquitlam’s Starting a Business page.

Get to know the area… and your competition

If you don’t already live in Port Coquitlam or the Tri-Cities area, it is a good idea to spend some time in the city. This will allow you to get a sense of the successful businesses that are currently operating in the area – including businesses that you will be in competition with. If your business is going to have a store front, you can use this time to search out potential areas for your business to operate.

Create a Website and Social Media Pages

If you’re thinking about starting a business in 2016 – you MUST have a website and social media pages. There is a vast amount of competing businesses in Port Coquitlam and the surrounding areas.

In order to be discovered by potential customers online, you must have an experienced, knowledgeable online marketing company who will be able to optimize your website and social media pages for optimal rankings.

Your online marketing company should be able to:

• Help your website gain top position in search result lists
• Perform keyword research to discover vital search combinations for your business
• Perform meta and title tag development
• Establish HTML code optimization
• Perform inbound link building

If this sounds like something that you will need help with, contact Longevity Graphics for a FREE 1-Hour Consultation. We specialize in working with local clients and helping them rank for their industry specific keywords.

Are you considering outsourcing your website design?

Below are some Pro’s and Con’s of hiring a local web designer vs. outsourcing your web design.

Pro’s of hiring a local web designer:

• Personalized, one-on-one service
• It’s easy to get in contact with your web designer if you have any questions
• You know exactly who will be working on the design of your website and social media pages

Con’s of hiring a local web designer:

• Well, we sure can’t think of any con’s!

Additional Resources

• Sign up your business on the Shop PoCo BIZ Directory; Click Here
• Join the Port Coquitlam Business Improvement Association (BIA); Click Here
• Join the Tri-Cities Chamber of Commerce; Click Here
• Contact Longevity Graphics for a FREE 1-Hour Consultation to learn about the online marketing services they offer; Click Here

Have you heard of Urbanspoon? How about Zomato?

Social Media Marketing Summer Promotion from Longevity Graphics

Receive a FREE Social Media Audit and learn more about our Summer Social Media Marketing promotion.

Choose 5 Social Media Marketing Platforms and we will:

• Setup
• Optimize
• Manage 

your account.

$1250   $995/month

ACT NOW! Limited Availability

CALL: 604-505-8552 or EMAIL: [email protected]

Platform options: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, Google+, YELP, Trip Advisor, Just Eat, Zomato (Formally Urban Spoon)

Social Media Marketing Services:

Social Media Marketing Setup

We will setup and optimize 5 social media platforms of your choice. By implementing engaging visuals and optimizing all the tools available through the platforms, we will achieve results. A strategy will be developed to ensure a consistent follower growth and engagement with your audience.

Social Media Marketing Content Management

First and foremost, we will perform an analysis of your industry, competition and clientele base. From there, we will make recommendations for the best content, visuals, and times to reach your audience. We will implement these recommendations, which will maximize your influence and generate relevant leads.

Social Media Marketing Reporting

On an ongoing basis, our team will analyze the results and provide a report on a monthly basis. Upon analysis, we will create a summary of our findings, make necessary adjustments and recommendations to ensure optimal results on all platforms.

Don’t delay, take advantage of our social media marketing summer promotion and get started right away. Our team of local experts will work with you and help you deliver your message loud and clear. Get your FREE social media marketing audit today.

Longevity Graphics is located in Coquitlam, BC. We specialize in online marketing services as well as web design and web development. For a list of our services or customer testimonials, visit our website today. We offer a FREE one hour consultation.

As a student, I was extremely grateful to receive an internship at Longevity Graphics. Knowing that marketing and design are the fields I wish to work in, they gladly welcomed me. My first internship took place last summer, and I am happy to say that I have come back for the second year!

When I first came to Longevity Graphics, right away, I was accepted into their team. The atmosphere and the knowledge of the office made it easier to learn new things. Coming into the office, I was surely not as experienced as others. But soon enough, thanks to their help, I feel I have become much more knowledgeable about marketing and design.

Here are some of the things I have learned:

1. While designing projects for customers, keep key ideas of what they suggested in mind. Your job is to create their visualization, not your own.
2. Make tons of different drafts for the customer to choose from.
3. While on the phone, don’t be afraid to ask for what you want.
4. While making your first campaign on Google Ad words, make sure it is perfect. If it’s not perfect, you might mess up future campaigns.
5. Save everything. Twice even.
6. Don’t be afraid to ask questions.

Working at Longevity Graphics has been a great opportunity and I am very grateful for the experience.

Thank you Longevity, you guys are the best!

If you work in web design or web development, then you probably can’t help but snarl when saying “Internet Explorer”. You might also share our aversion to any IE-related applications such as Microsoft/Yahoo’s Bing search engine. We have largely ignored Bing in favour of Google, but we keep our minds open to anything that might affect SEO.

Just this month, Bing has released the ‘Phoenix’ update for its Webmaster Tools. The interface has been overhauled and optimised for usability. At first glance, it is definitely reminiscent of Google Analytics, but Bing’s interface is more straightforward. Data is much easier to access with fewer clicks required to get more in-depth information.

New (beta) features include the Link Explorer, which allows you to view the backlinks of any domain, and the SEO Analyzer/SEO Reports, which can perform an analysis of the on-page SEO of any page from one of your verified domains. The Link Explorer allows the checking of backlinks to a URL, with an option to check backlinks to any page on a domain.

The Bing Webmaster Tools also include a tool for doing keyword research with organic search results (results that exclude data from adCenter), as well as a built-in markup validator with results that display the page you validated as it appears in the browser with convenient annotations that contain deeper information you can access simply by hovering over certain data.

While these tools exist elsewhere on the internet – and many of them are available in Google Adwords or Google Analytics – it is very handy to have such tools integrated to an SEO suite. As a package, it’s very attractive. It was attractive enough for me to test it out with our site. Initially, because of a bug, I wasn’t able to view any data. At the time of posting this, however, the bug seems to be fixed and I can really see the value of using Bing Webmaster Tools.

The value of Bing-specific data.

Google dominates search; there’s no doubt about that. However, Internet Explorer is the default browser on any new computer running Windows. Since IE has integrated Bing as its search engine, Bing has a large automatic user-base made up of people who either don’t know the difference between – or don’t know how to change – browsers. However, Bing is nowhere close to Google in terms of their users.

Google has about 60-70% of the market share while Bing has roughly 20-30%. Is it worth doing two sets of keyword research when the keyword research I can do through Google is relevant to 60-70% of searchers rather than the 20-30% using Bing? If keyword research results from Bing are different from Google’s, should I simply ignore the data altogether?

The question on my mind is how relevant the data I’m getting from Bing really is. How similar Bing and Google were regarding how they rank and index pages? I found a great article on SEO moz detailing the commonalities between Google and Bing. To summarize their findings, Google and Bing are quite similar, with the two becoming increasingly more similar as time goes on (more likely a case of Bing become more like Google than the other way around).

I take the findings as confirmation that it’s not a waste of time to play with Bing’s Webmaster Tools, which makes me happy because I really like the simplicity of its interface and the depth of the data it provides. I wonder if we’ll see some changes from Google Analytics and Google Adwords in an attempt to provide a similar application that merges the two. Exciting!

Looking to drive more traffic to your website? We all are, aren’t we? Ever hear of Google Adwords? Most business owners have either heard of it or have even tried it out themselves. Google offers a free $100 coupon for first time business owners and even offers to help you setup the account. Sounds good, right? Business owners beware!

I have been setting up Google Adwords accounts for business owners for over 10 years and have learned from experience the best ways to optimize your Google Adwords account to get the most return on your ad spend. I charge all of my clients a fee to setup their Google Adwords accounts up because it’s takes time to setup the campaign correctly the first time. This saves our clients money in management fees in the long run. Management time is much easier and time effective.

Frequently clients hear about the Free $100 coupon for Google Adwords which includes a  Google specialist assisting them on setting up their accounts for free. They often ask why I charge a setup fee when they can get Google to do it for them. Here is a little case study that we recently did to test Google’s free account setup.

CASE STUDY

A local Ranch in BC providing horseback trail rides to BC residents approached us to setup their Google Adwords account up. We contacted Google Adwords free account services to help with the setup. The Google specialist was very pleasant to deal with and set the whole campaign up for us in about 20 minutes. After the campaign was setup, this is what we found.

1. The campaign was setup to geographically target all of the United States (not BC)
2. There was only one ad group setup
3. All of the keywords were included in the one ad group (this will lower the quality score)
4. The keywords selected included horseback vacations (which the client does not provide)
5. The ad copy was again promoting horseback riding vacations
6. The ads were being pointed to a generic landing page instead of the landing page specific to horseback trail rides

If we were to let the campaign go live the way that it had been setup by the Google Adwords specialist, my client would have been wasting their money, and the end result in their mind would be that, “Google Adwords does not work“.

WHAT WE DID

We modified the campaign to target local searchers using keywords that described the service being offered. We created multiple ad groups of unique keyword phrases so that we could target the ad copy to the search query. We sent traffic to the landing page describing the horseback trail rides. Within the first 2 days of the campaign that WE created going live, our client is already receiving requests for their services.

We are a fully certified Google Adwords agency and take the time to get to know our clients, the services that they provide, their target audience and their competition. We take pride in helping our clients grow their businesses and are only happy when our clients are happy.

If you are considering implementing a Google Adwords campaign, please contact us first for a free consultation so that we can help you save money in the long run and build your business with strategic internet advertising planning.

Lindsay Viscount, Owner / Creative Director
[email protected]

If you are all about visuals, Pinterest is the social media site to be on. It is a large social media platform that gathers everyone’s interests in one place. This is the perfect place to be if you want to know the current and up and coming trends. Their mission is to “connect everyone in the world through the ‘things’ they find interesting.”

Pinterest is beautifully organized by its pin-board/grid type layout which makes it visually stimulating.

Pinterest home page

It is easy to use and allows you to share your hobbies, interest, events and more. Pinterest provides you with a ‘pin it’ button to add to your bookmarks. This allows you to ‘pin’ any image, blog, or website directly onto Pinterest. You can also create different categories that suit your interests, plus you also have the option to share your ‘pins’ on Twitter or Facebook.  Another cool and handy thing about Pinterest is that the images are a direct link to the original source.

Pin Board Categories

My experience with Pinterest has been more than awesome. I must say I’m pretty much addicted to it because I can find everything that I like on one site. What’s even better is that people are very active and supportive on Pinterest. My first ‘pin’ ended up getting more than 140 repins within less than an hour, 84 likes with more than 30 follows, in one day. I must say, it’s pretty liberating to see that people ‘repin,’ like and follow you because they also have the same interest.

Here are a few reason why you should use Pinterest?

1. Most people use it on a personal level. It is an archive for all your interests. It’s also a really good source for inspiration.
2. Businesses are now getting a hold of Pinterest and its social media marketing and SEO value

• It’s great for crowd sourcing – encouraging your fans to create pins revolving around your products/brand
• Great to promote certain giveaways or contests
• Ability to drive traffic to your website by adding keywords and links in your description
• By adding ‘pin it’ buttons on your website allows Pinterest users to automatically pin your website onto their Pinterest pin boards.

So, I suggest you get yourself started with Pinterest, explore and connect with people who are interested in the same things as you. For businesses, I suggest you to experiment with different strategies that can drive in new customers or traffic to your website. Pinterest allows room for you to be creative with your branding approach. Until next time, Go and PIN your INTEREST.