SEO Guide Articles

Online advertising goals generally fall into one of two categories: direct response or branding.

Direct response

If your goal is direct response, you’d like a user to perform an action after clicking through your ad to your website: make a purchase, sign up to a newsletter, or request a quote, for instance. The completion of your desired action by the user is called a conversion.

Each type of listing — organic and paid — has a type of marketing approach associated with it.

Search engine optimization

Search engine optimization (SEO) involves building new websites, or changing existing websites, so that they rank highly in a search engine’s organic listings when users search on terms that are related to the site’s content. To learn about SEO for Google organic search results, visit Google’s Webmaster Central site.

Although SEM refers to placing ads just on search engines, online advertising as a whole is much broader. The possibilities of online advertising include placing ads on nearly any type of website or page a user might browse, such as news, blogs, reviews, entertainment, online magazines, and marketplaces. In AdWords, these other sites make up the Google Content Network.

A search engine helps users find the things they’re looking for online. The user types a word or phrase, called a query, into the search engine, which then displays a set of results that are relevant to the query.