By Natasha Bandoquillo

I’m going to get right into this because I can’t even begin to explain how many times I’m asked this on a daily basis!

Search Engine Optimization is when your website ranks in the “organic search”, meaning, you didn’t pay for it. This takes time, as Google ranks a site highly on how old it is, how much content there is, how many sites link back to this site and are they reputable websites. It’s a slow-burn, but the pay-off is so, so, worth it. In fact, if you rank high on SEO, you don’t have to spend as much on SEM.

Here’s an example of Nike in an organic search. As you can see, the real estate on this organic result alone is pretty big. You can’t help but click on this result!

Which leads me to Search Engine Marketing. This is where you have to shell some money, and chances are your competition is paying for the ads, and laughing at you because you aren’t advertising.

Google Ads/Bing Ads show up before any organic result. They are the first thing you will see, and typically take up two spots on the top page before the organic results begin. They will always, ALWAYS be clicked before anything else and a user will most likely be happy with what they found on that paid ad, and not even bother to look at the organic result. Sorry.

Nike.com pays a LOT OF MONEY to advertise. There’s a reason why companies pay for their advertising – because it works.

Here’s the Nike ad that appeared right before the organic result:

Now you may be asking yourself, why is Nike advertising when they’re just going to show up anyway?

Google Ads allow you to advertise any deals within the ad. These ads will also appear if you are to search Adidas (their big competitor), Reebok, and APL. Another fun thing about these ads is that they will begin to follow you around. So if you didn’t click on it then, chances are you’ll go on a website and you’ll see the ad.

I went on CNN.com right now and these Nike shoes showed up in a display ad.

These ads can also follow you to your GMail.com inbox, YouTube, everywhere! You can’t escape them. So it’s no wonder that companies pay lots of money for advertising because it is so relentless, so inescapable, that the person who views it will at some point, go on your website and take an action: either browse your website’s content, or if you are an eCommerce website, purchase something.

It is not easy to program ads that behave in this way, but PON Creative Group has done this time and time again for clients. One client wrote back that their friends were seeing their ads on YouTube. Then they started seeing them on Google. And then Facebook. And then she started seeing the ads everywhere – in gaming apps, reading articles on different websites, and then finally, as a snippet in her Gmail account.

We create consistent advertising across multiple platforms so you become inescapable. Obviously, the more marketing dollars you invest, the more rewards you’ll receive, but it is definitely doable with a smaller budget.

Hit us up and we’ll explain how we got it down to a science and we can tell you how well it’ll work for you.