We receive a lot of questions, especially regarding our internet marketing services, about the difference between optimization and marketing. Do they mean the same thing? Is one the parent of the other? Can you really compare marketing and optimization side-by-side?

This question often comes up when differentiating our Search Engine Optimization services versus our Search Engine Marketing services. At a 30,000-foot-view, yes, search engine optimization is really just one aspect of search engine marketing. But for us, a fairly focused and simplistic internet marketing company, we like to give the term “marketing services” a different meaning.

We’re an internet marketing company, everything we do is marketing. We only do marketing. So you can assume that if we offer optimization services, it, quite simply, is a form of marketing.

Below are our definitions for optimization and marketing, and how we differentiate the two when talking about internet marketing services.

Putting money towards a specific, measurable goal with the intention of getting more money back in return.

The continual process of presenting your brand in the best possible way.

So what’s the difference?

If marketing and optimization we’re units in a business, marketing would be considered a profit-center and optimization would be considered a cost-center. Marketing, in Feyer Marketing’s sense of the word, specifically targets building revenue. Optimization, while it may also build revenue, specifically targets¬†improving¬†performance, efficiency and accessibility.

For example, Mobile Optimization is the process of making your brand easily accessible to mobile device users. You could do this by creating a mobile-friendly website or using mobile-friendly style sheets (read our blog post about the two here).

On the other hand, Mobile Marketing is the investment of resources aimed at increasing revenue from mobile users. You could do this by advertising in mobile applications or starting a mobile marketing campaign where users can check-in at your restaurant for a discount.

Marketing tries to make the sale. Optimization tries to extend the brand.

There’s a common misconception about what internet marketing is. To some, internet marketing has something to do with a pyramid scheme. They‚Äôve probably had an acquaintance send an e-mail or Facebook message about how they‚Äôre making all this money doing what they love online. All you have to do to be a part of it is pay $99. This sometimes is labelled as “internet marketing,” but it’s not. It‚Äôs simply pyramid scheme 2.0. People are now just using the internet to “market” their business of selling nothing.

Now that we got that out of the way, let’s talk about what internet marketing really is. Internet marketing is just marketing, but on the internet. It’s simply the promotion of a business, product or service using online channels. The basic online channels today are made up of websites, social networks, search engines, online publications, e-mail and mobile networks. Below is a brief overview of each online channel:

Websites

While all of the online channels basically fall into this category (they’re all websites), this is primarily business websites and microsites. In the case of the company Coca-Cola, this would be their corporate website: www.coca-cola.com or a product microsite like www.cocacolazero.com.

Social Networks

Social network online channels are where businesses can interact with their customers and prospects with the intent of promoting their products and services. This can either be through what we call social media optimization, which is simply businesses creating and using social media accounts, or what we call social media marketing, which is simply paying to place advertisements on social networks. In the case of Coca-Cola, this would be their Facebook page or their promoted tweets on Twitter.

Search Engines

Search engines are another place to promote your business online. This is typically given the umbrella term of “search engine marketing” and is made up of search engine optimization and search engine advertising. Read our “Basics” blog posts on each of these to learn more. In the case of Coca-Cola, this would be their search engine advertisements or their optimization for the term “diet cola.”

Online Publications

Online publications serve a similar purpose to that of newspapers in the offline age. To businesses they are important because they have large audiences and wherever there‚Äôs a large audience, there’s a place for advertisements. This is sometimes also called display advertising. In the case of Coca-Cola, this would be their advertisement on an online publication like msnbc.com or Yahoo Finance.

E-mail

The e-mail channel (e-mail marketing) is another internet marketing channel where a business would send marketing material to their audiences using e-mail. This would be similar to Coca-Cola sending an e-mail to consumers about their My Coke Rewards program.

Mobile Networks

Mobile networks are a fairly new frontier in the world of internet marketing. There is a growing mobile-device-using population and advertisers are looking to reach them in a variety of ways. First is through traditional advertising, serving ads on mobile websites and within mobile applications. Another is through mobile campaigns, such as offering discounts to customers who use their phone to “check-in” at their store location (this example would be a hybrid with social media marketing).

Hopefully this gives you a good overview of what internet marketing is and why it’s valuable to businesses. We believe that internet marketing is the absolute best way to spend your marketing budget because of the results (read our blog post about it here).

What is search advertising? Simple: it’s advertising within a search engine. When people use Google, Bing or Yahoo, they’re brought to a page with their results. At the top and right-hand side of the results are paid listings (red sections below). These comprise of what is called search advertising.

These ads are strictly pay per click (PPC), where the advertiser is only paying Google, Bing or Yahoo when their ad is clicked by a searcher. Advertisers can purchase and manage their ad campaigns through Google Adwords for Google search results or Microsoft AdCenter for Bing and Yahoo search results. The ads go through a bidding auction and quality analysis to determine where they are placed. This is while you’ll see ads that are relevant to search queries in the results.

Search advertising is a good option for any size business. Here are a few reasons why:

• Costs are inexpensive and easily controlled
• Audience can be very narrow or very broad
• Easy to track return on investment
• Leads are warm because they‚Äôre already searching for your products and services
• Accounts are easy to setup

If you’re interested in learning more about search advertising and how it can help you business, contact us, and we’ll give you $100 in credit to get started.

What is SEO? First of all it’s an acronym that stands for Search Engine Optimization.

Search Engine Optimization is an internet marketing strategy that improves the visibility of a website in organic, or unpaid, search engine results. In other words, the goal of SEO is to get a website to appear higher in search engine results.

For example, when someone makes a search on Google, let’s say for “tire replacement service,” they’ll be brought to a page with search results including links to various websites. Google automatically arranges the results in order based on what they think would be most relevant to the searcher. If you’re a business owner or marketer, you obviously would like your website to be associated with certain searches, and want it to appear in search results before your competition does.

This is where SEO comes into play. SEO attempts to improve relevance and create credibility for specific search queries.

Relevance of Content

Part of SEO is optimizing your website so that search engines automatically associate your website with certain key words and phrases. So if I own a business that sells tires, I want my website to be associated with words and phrases like “tire replacement,” “tire repair,” or “goodyear tires.” So I would optimize specific pages on my website with text, heading and title content that contains those phrases.

Credibility of Content

Now that my website is associated with those keywords, I want to make sure I appear before my competition. We want to appear to be more authoritative than our competition (I would recommend BEING more authoritative, rather than just appearing that way). So how do we get this authority? There are several ways. One could be through the history of your website and domain name. Another could be through the amount of relevant content. The best, fastest, and perhaps easiest (though the actual process is often difficult and grueling), way you get authority is through a relationship with another website that has authority. So I want other websites to also link to my website so that it appears that I have authority on my particular subject.

In the End

In the end, if you have good relevant content and proper authority, you can get your website to appear higher and higher in search results. This entire process is called search engine optimization or SEO.