Are Google search engine rankings important for mechanical services?

Chances are if you have gone to the effort of developing a website you would (rightly!) expect that website to deliver a return to your business. It should represent your brand, product and/or services, provide a positive user experience, deliver inquiries, leads, and sales to your bottom line when done properly.

But what if that time and money spent has your website looking great, but no one can find it?

Enter SEO and SEM. Two marketing acronyms that aren’t often found in conversations in the mechanical services industry. We often hear them in the form of questions like ‘‘why isn’t my website showing up on Google?’’.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) are what you need to get those elusive Google rankings that see some companies sitting on page one of search engines constantly, versus those who drop over to page two, and beyond (is there even anything beyond page 1…).

They’re important if you want anyone to find and subsequently visit your website.

What’s the difference between SEO and SEM?

While SEO and SEM are both working with keywords and have the same goal in mind (visibility in search, resulting in traffic to your website), they’re not really the same at all — let us explain:

They are a different marketing skillset

A digital marketer who does SEM might not do SEO and vice versa. Some may do both. The main point is, that the work undertaken for SEM vs SEO has little overlap.

In SEM we typically design campaigns using Google Adwords that focus on getting your website in front of people who are searching for what you sell. This is a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaign. When working in PPC we place a bid on your desired keyword/s, then when someone searches for that keyword, your ad shows up and you pay the designated amount from your set campaign budget when someone clicks on your link (and yes, you control the budget amount so things can’t go haywire).

When working on SEO for your website, the goal is to optimise the entire site to enable Google to better understand and trust its content. This means writing fresh content with quality internal and external links, resizing and naming images, changing URLs, writing relevant text for a bunch of little spots you might not realise exist such as meta tags, alt tags and header tags, adding links to other sources, and much more. It is all organically built into your website and something your marketers and web developers should do as part of any website build.

Placement in search engine results

When using SEM, a Google Adwords campaign will mean that your website will show up at the very top of the search page in the first handful of results, depending on the competition in that keyword space. The paid search results are prominent and to the average Googler the small text denoting that it is an ad is barely noticeable.

On the other hand, SEO supports your site popping up in organic search results. Organic results sit further down the page and are not marked as ads or sponsored.

How quickly results happen

Of course, everyone wants results as quickly as possible, so If you have to be there fast, SEM is the way. With an effective SEM strategy in place, results are instant. You can turn your Google Adwords campaign on and off depending on your desired budget and timeframes.

SEO is effective but you need to play the long game (we’re talking months). While a good SEO overhaul can work wonders for your website, it does tend to be an ongoing effort that is required to continue to maintain top results in organic search.

Search engine rankings initially can take a little marketing effort, but once there, you reap the most reward with a ranking that sits on a highly used platform - 24/7.

The ability to tweak and test

With SEM, your PPC campaign can quickly and easily be tested, tweaked, and refined to establish what works for you and what doesn’t. Again, great for when you want more leads sooner rather than later.

SEO you can definitely tweak and refine, but you can’t test it and then quickly change it up to see a result in the short term. For this reason, it doesn’t have the same level of instant results as SEM.

So which option is better?

Knowing whether to use SEM or SEO can be confusing.

One or both could be effective, but it depends on your business’s unique circumstances and goals.

We specialise in getting exceptional results regardless of which option you choose. And the great part is - not many businesses are maximising their growth with either SEO or SEM in the mechanical services industry.

Let’s chat about what’s best to grow your business so that you can get ahead.