What is the difference between paid referencing and natural referencing? (SEO vs. SEA)

SEO is short for Search Engine Optimization. SEO includes all the activities you do to get your website to rank higher in the organic results of the SERPs.

Search engine advertising, also known as CPC, is the process of advertising directly on Google and other similar engines. When you use SEA, the engines display your company's ads in the results above the organic results.

When a company wants to start a work of notoriety online, the choice between paid referencing and natural referencing is a question often asked.

These two strategies are not opposed and are complementary over time. But in the short term, depending on certain criteria, prioritizing one lever or the other may be necessary.

Online SEO work via the Google Ads paid auction system is a totally different tool and strategy from SEO.

The time to achieve a result and the distribution of costs are different. Each system has its advantages and disadvantages depending on your industry, the presence of competitors, and the urgency to achieve results.

An SEO agency like Net Offensive can support a company in SEO or SEA in order to develop a strategy of notoriety and traffic against your competitors.

SEO (search engine optimization)

SEA (search engine advertising)

SEO + SEA = SEM (Search Engine Marketing)

It is two terms that are often put in competition and opposed to each other while they are the components of the same common goal, your visibility, and conversion.

Often put in opposition, as if it were necessary to choose one or the other by principle, the SEO (Search Engine Optimization or natural referencing) and SEA (Search Engine Advertising) strategies nevertheless share a common objective: to improve the visibility, the traffic of your website and the conversion. Complementary, they are in fact the two spearheads of any well-thought-out digital strategy.

SEO: a long-term strategy

Commonly known as natural referencing or organic SEO, SEO is a set of techniques aimed at improving the positioning of a website on the results pages. SEO is an effective tool and a long-term notoriety strategy that gives a result without time, usually within 6 to 12 months, depending on the investment and actions of competitors.

Its primary objective is simple: to raise the content of a website to be first on Google on the targeted keywords. Internet users rarely access the secondary pages of the results.

Its advantage is therefore obvious. It will contribute to your brand visibility and increase visits to your website, provided you give your strategy enough time for it to bear fruit. Local SEO is another strategy to consider for local businesses.

It is indeed a long-term strategy and it is not uncommon to wait several months before obtaining visible results. Stay patient, it's worth it in the long run, and acquisition costs are on average the lowest of any marketing method.

The 5 facets of natural referencing

Contrary to a widely held idea, SEO is not limited to the simple integration of keywords into the proposed content. It is in fact a global marketing strategy comprising several facets:

• Competitive analysis: By studying the behavior of the players in your market, you will be able to establish an effective strategy.

• Technical auditing: its effectiveness is closely linked to the very structure of the pages of your website. Loading speed, the integration of title tags and images, the quality of the code, the structuring of the content, and the writing of meta descriptions are some of the essential factors in any well-thought-out SEO strategy.

• The definition of the semantic field and keywords: More than the integration of keywords, the semantic richness of your texts will help improve SEO. It will therefore be a question of carefully selecting the keywords and expressions on which you want to position yourself and placing them in specific places on your pages, without ever abusing them.

• Analysis of backlinks and internal links: To enhance your website, engines require open content. Surely there is nothing more harmful than text that is inaccessible or does not refer to any page. The integration of internal links and backlinks will play a fundamental role in this respect. A viable long-term Netlinking strategy must therefore be developed. Beware of penalties.

• Optimized writing: The visibility of your website depends above all on the quality of its editorial content, which is one of the main criteria taken into account by Google. This is called "content marketing".

SEA: a fast and paid marketing solution

Based on a CPC keyword purchase system, advertising campaigns allow companies to position their ads on search pages associated with the Google universe (Gmail, YouTube, AdWords publishers, etc.). They are carried out through Google Ads, the digital advertising platform of the American giant.

The principle of operation of a SEA campaign is simple: each publisher is invited to participate in an auction on a given keyword. The highest bidder will see his ad appear at the top of the results, a position particularly sought after by advertisers for the visibility it provides. Campaigns "Only a display" offer the opportunity to occupy the advertising space made available to the partner sites.

SEA is generally based on the CPC (cost per click) auction method. To appear on certain keywords, publishers will have to pay not for each display, but for each click on the advertising insert. It, therefore, involves sometimes substantial expenses, especially if competition is strong. Why use Google Ads advertising for your traffic investment?

Some advertisers are afraid that the number of clicks will explode or fraud to fake visitors. The system of the control room offers all the features to manage this.

The 3 advantages of SEA

Essential to any well-executed digital marketing strategy, advertising seduces advertisers with the many advantages they induce:

• Speed of results: Getting started with Google Ads gets quick results. Thanks to them, your advertising showcase will be visible within a few hours, the time to create your ads.

• The quality of targeting: It works on the acquisition of ultra-specific keywords and is perfectly adapted to the searches of your customers. By seeing the ad, people are therefore more likely to click and buy one of your products or services. Ads capture 64.6% of clicks when they correspond to transactional queries. Statistics and performance indicators also allow very qualitative monitoring and easy analysis. It is also possible to ban keywords to optimize the profitability of campaigns.

• The ease of implementation: An SEA campaign does not involve any technical or editorial changes to your website, except very slight.

SEA and SEO: an essential complementarity

In view of the specificities and complementarity of SEO and SEA, it would in fact be quite futile to oppose them. These two types of campaigns actually participate in an overall marketing strategy, Search Engine Marketing. In order to achieve better results, it will therefore be better to take advantage of their complementarity.

It is therefore particularly recommended as part of a short-term advertising campaign, to launch a new product or to quickly make your business known to a very targeted audience.

SEO, which takes longer to implement, makes it possible to position itself durably at the top of the results. As such, it is a perennial showcase for your brand.

One, however, does not go without the other. Since they are also based on the use of keywords, ads actually act as full-scale tests for SEO. The quick selection of keywords they allow offers a unique opportunity to test the searches that generate the most traffic. They can then be safely integrated into your strategies.

It offers fast financial results. An effective campaign will therefore generate enough revenue to finance a complete SEO redesign of your site, guaranteeing its visibility in the long term.

The interdependence between SEA and SEO, however, is not only in one sense. An advertiser with a perfectly optimized site will benefit from a major advantage for his AdWords campaign: a reduced cost per click. The optimization of your content contributes to the improvement of your Quality Score, lowering at the same time the costs of acquiring your queries.