SEO vs SEM, Who’s The Champ?
What is SEO and SEM?
Search Engine Optimization or SEO increases your website visibility and shows your website to people searching for related services or products that you offer organically. Read more here on how you can Boost Your Organic Seo In 2021 With These 5 Simple Tips
While Search Engine Marketing (SEM) uses paid advertisements that appear on search engine results places, such as Google, Yahoo or Bing search, it also has been referred to as paid search engine advertising or pay-per-click (PPC) ads. Read more here on 3 best practices of SEM.
Understanding your audience better is crucial for both methods to be successful. SEO and SEM use keyword search to find and target relevant keywords. Knowing what your competition is targeting would give you an added advantage too.
Both methods are like the front and back of your hand that lift your website up and surface it to your ideal audience, yet SEO and SEM flex differently due to the different activities that make up different aspects of digital marketing. Oftentimes, these two terms are utilized together to reference activities that work towards the objective of getting eyeballs to your website, and ultimately convert them into paying customers for products and services.
What’s their differences?
For your website to appear in search engine results,
- SEO focuses on organic ways.
- SEM focuses on paid ads.
For brands to drive traffic, gain attention, and develop their business, it is essential for them to utilize both SEO and SEM in their marketing strategy. Hence, it can be confusing for people who aren’t familiar with digital marketing. So, how can you harness both their strength and reap their benefits?
Let’s take Google search engine as the context of discussion to understand how SEO and SEM works. The search results in Google search engine are divided into two categories: first is the paid search results and second is the organic search results.
As we know, SEO focuses on ranking your website organically within search engines. The challenge here is search optimization can be tricky to implement and it takes a few months at least for it to kick in, that is if you get it right.
On the other hand, SEM is paid advertising directly to Google, that uses both pay-per-click (PPC) and some form of SEO to get your website ranked within their high heatmap prime spots. So SEM when done right, would ultimately help push your organic ranking too in the long run.
Final Note
It is important that you know and understand the purpose of both SEO and SEM, incorporate them into your digital marketing strategy and harness their benefits together to drive quality traffic to your website and ultimately make that sales.
However, if you are resource strapped and can only work on one method, we recommend you start with SEM, as it has a higher chance to convert faster. Moreover, a well executed SEM will ultimately help you achieve the results of what you want from SEO efforts. It’s a dream for any businesses to have their website listed on page 1 of Google, in both the paid and organic spaces.