Most people utilize a search engine to find information on the internet. This includes your current and any potential customers.

Using a search engine, can your company be found under the products and/or services your offer? Is your web site on the first page of results? If you answered no to either of these questions, Sapphire Solutions can help!

Wikipedia tells us Search Engine Marketing, (SEM), is a form of Internet marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) through the use of paid placement, contextual advertising, and paid inclusion.

Some experts include Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as a part of Search Engine Marketing. However, many companies advertise Search Engine Optimization, but blur the line between SEM and SEO. These companies want you to believe that if you pay them $1200 per year for Search Engine Optimization, you are getting Search Engine Marketing. Other companies advertise Search Engine Marketing, when they should only be advertising Search Engine Optimization. There is definitely a difference!

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is all about how a web site is designed, how it is programmed and how the content is organized. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is how a web site is marketed on a Search engine.

While the whole idea of SEM is to increase your web site’s traffic, a successful marketing campaign correlates directly to the successful use of “solid SEO practices”. Otherwise, the popularity of your web site will always depend on the amount of money spent making sure the site is visible. For this reason we don’t recommend paid advertisement, without making sure the web site is first optimized for search engines.

To give our clients a head start, Sapphire Solutions utilizes “solid SEO practices” as the core of every web site we build, though it is often overlooked by other web site developers. Making sure these “solid SEO practices” have been used, implementing them if they have not, is the first step in Search Engine Marketing.

After making sure “solid SEO practices” have been used, we move on to other Search Engine Marketing (SEM) mediums, such as paid placement, contextual advertising, and paid inclusion. To do this, we look at the potential return on investment (ROI) of additional dollars in SEM. This ROI number should be measured first by the SERPs and then by the overall increase in the client’s revenue stream.

Though it is unrealistic to think your web site will be found in the top ranking search engine position all the time, we have a system which can dramatically increase the probability. We do not guarantee a top position but it is not unreasonable to expect a location in the top 1 percent. We work with you and your marketing staff to develop a plan in which paid advertisement is used to gain additional visibility for your web site. Additional visibility leads to more traffic. More traffic leads to more customers. More customers leads to more revenue!