The organic listings within the major search engines are definitely the more preferred type of advertising for any company in any industry. Organic listings are trusted anywhere from 70% to 90% more than the advertisements that are around them. This does not mean, however, that there is no use for the advertisements that you see on Google and the rest of the major search engines. As a matter of fact, the discipline that is used to place those ads may actually help your search engine optimization efforts. Search engine marketing is the practice of getting a great deal for the ads that show up on the front pages of the major search engines. This is a discipline that, if used correctly, can be incredibly helpful for a long-term strategy that includes both search engine optimization and search engine marketing. Let’s take a look at exactly why. SEO News: SEO is about the long term First of all, search engine optimization is all about the long term. The listings that show up for competitive keywords are there partially because of age. Google tends to trust a website that is there for a longer period of time. If you have a young website, but you need sales this quarter instead of two years down the road, you don’t have the ability to wait on this. This is exactly were search engine marketing comes in. While you are creating long term content for your organic listings, you can fill in the gaps with short-term advertisements that will show up immediately. Your real concern is getting a plan together so that you can get the most out of the money that you spend. However, there is an even better reason to do search engine marketing. SEO Tips: Get keywords from SEM You can find out what the keywords are for your search engine optimization campaign. The keywords that allow you to create a highly visible search engine marketing ad are the same keywords that allow you to create a top listing in the organic ads. However, you would never know what these keywords were unless you had some sort of data to show what the response was. Search engine marketing, or short-term advertisements, can get you this data very quickly. Now that you have it, you can immediately start optimising your content for those keywords so that your organic listings show up more quickly. These dual SEO strategies are exactly what most companies engage in. You may see them show up in the organic listings and in the advertisements at the same time if they have a big sale going on. This is par for the course for companies with multimillion dollar budgets, but even small and medium-sized businesses can participate in it as well. Scale down, but the overall strategy is the same.