SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and SEM (Search Engine Marketing) are valuable and powerful tools for your business that may seem similar at first glance as they are both geared towards generating website traffic, but when we look deeper we realize that they are completely different methods of traffic generation.
The difference between search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) is that SEO focuses on getting traffic from organic searches, while SEM focuses on getting traffic from organic and paid searches.
SEO is sometimes used as an umbrella term that includes SEM, but since SEM refers strictly to paid advertising, they are actually separate. SEM is about getting traffic through paid ads, while SEO is more focused on acquiring, monitoring and analyzing organic (non-paid) traffic patterns.
Differences and similarities between SEO and SEM
How do they differ?
- SEO involves optimizing the content and visibility of a website so that it appears higher in the SERPs. SEM, on the other hand, involves promoting websites to increase visibility and traffic on SERPs.
- SEM is based on two techniques: unpaid marketing (free) and paid marketing. Unpaid marketing is carried out by SEO, so SEO is part of SEM.
- The volume of SEM traffic is controllable and depends on the amount a person can pay or bid for online marketing. On the contrary, SEO is obscure to predict traffic in advance, and it also takes a lot of time compared to SEM.
- SEO is an organic (free) search strategy while SEM is usually a paid strategy.
- SEM is expensive although it is a cost-effective technique. On the other hand, SEO does not require additional costs, unlike SEM (unless you hire SEO specialists to do the work for you)
What are their similarities?
- SEO and SEM help to appear in the top positions of search results.
- The goal of SEO and SEM is to attract a higher quantity and quality of traffic to a website.
- To be successful in SEO and SEM, you must know your audience. The strategies of both marketing methods are based on effectively targeting customers and capturing their interest.
- Both SEO and SEM are based on keyword research. This includes understanding what terms a user searches for when using Google.
- SEO and SEM are not one-size-fits-all strategies. Each method must be continually analyzed, tested and optimized to ensure success.
What are the benefits of SEO and SEM for your business?
Despiteall the differences between SEO and SEM, both play an important role in the success of today’s businesses. More than half of the world’s population uses the Internet, making the Internet a market to be reckoned with. It is impossible for companies to miss out on such huge opportunities.
Increasing web traffic is one of the top marketing priorities for companies. There are a variety of ways to do this, but SEO and SEM are the main ones. When used correctly SEO and SEM are the perfect combination to get better results for your business.
Increase the number of visitors to your website
A good web marketing campaign will allow your site to rank better in search results. The implication of this for your traffic is great. Whether it is paid or organic results, consumers tend to select sites on the first page of SERPs. This gives a brand more opportunities to showcase their products and services because more people will see them.
Better conversion
One of the advantages of SEO and SEM is that they allow search engines to find sites with the right target audience in mind. This is because search engines use complex algorithms to ensure that the results displayed are relevant to the user. This is good news for your business, as it means that many of the visitors to your site have purchase intent. Therefore, more clicks mean more customers.
Improve your brand presence
It doesn’t matter how good your products or services are if your audience doesn’t know about you. SEO and SEM help companies get the recognition they deserve. It doesn’t even have to be a visit, the simple fact of appearing on search pages is a benefit in itself. When your brand appears in many search results, more people know you exist. That, in turn, will inform them of the services you provide or the products you offer.
What is SEO?
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a set of techniques used to rank a website in a good position and increase the visibility of that site so that it can be easily found on the Internet. In other words, it improves the organic positioning of the website in search engines. Organic here refers to the free service. An optimized website is more easily recognized by search engine crawlers, which translates into an improvement of the website’s position in search engine results pages (SERP). Google uses more than 200 criteria to evaluate which website should appear at the top of Google’s search results for a given keyword.
SEO can be optimized in two ways: SEO On Page and SEO Off Page. SEO On Page refers to optimizing the website by correctly distributing the keywords throughout the website and making the structure (web page, titles, tags, content, etc.) of the website as good as possible and complementing the target keyword. Off Page SEO consists of obtaining quality links from other high ranking websites to build trust from a search engine’s point of view.
The tasks that are performed to optimize search are:
- Keyword research and appropriate use of keywords on the website.
- Writing content based on the needs of visitors.
- Optimizing web pages to minimize loading time.
- Make navigation simple but effective for users.
- Create quality backlinks to your website from other domains.
- Build ways for visitors to visit more pages, spend more time on the site and decrease bounce rate.
What is SEM?
SEM (Search Engine Marketing) is a generic term used for paid or unpaid search marketing in which a company pays the search engine to display its ads in search results. SEM includes paid search (cost per click or pay per click) and organic SEO . Marketers analyze previous search engine query statistics to determine the most effective keywords a company can use in its promotional campaign.
Keywords are the fundamental part that forms the basis of search engine marketing as an advertising strategy. For this reason, before choosing keywords for SEM campaigns, thorough research should be conducted as part of the keyword management strategy for best results. In SEM, ads appear in the SERPs near the organic listings, which offers the company the opportunity to increase the visibility of its website.
Tasks performed in SEM
- Launching the advertising campaign with the intention of reaching a specific audience.
- Creation of ad groups with several target keywords.
- Setting the ad budget.
- Tracking SEM metrics such as clicks, impressions, click-through rates, etc.
Which is better SEO or SEM?
Cost
The term SEM pay-per-click is a clue in itself. You pay every time a user clicks on your paid search result. The initial cost may not be noticeable, but its cumulative cost over time will take its toll. In addition, the bid amount of an ad is one of the factors that determine the rank of a page. This means that you will probably have to spend more to get better results.
On the other hand, SEO, although not free (because it requires at least investing your time), is not that expensive compared to SEM. It is true that you will have to spend a certain amount on a competitive SEO campaign. However, there are good reasons to invest money in SEO. Reputation enhancement, profitability and brand value, among others, make the price worth it. In addition, when a campaign is successful, you will spend less money and effort on maintaining your position.
Therefore, in terms of cost, SEO can generate better results in the long run than SEM.
how long does it take to work?
SEM can do something that SEO only dreams of: shoot your site to the top overnight. This is because as soon as an ad is paid for and deployed, it will start appearing in the SERPs. Moreover, it can be adjusted at any time to rank even higher.
SEO is the slow and steady counterpart. It usually takes a few months for results to appear. And within those months, the continued application of good SEO strategies is necessary for the campaign to produce good results.
Don’t be fooled though, being able to pay to appear in the first search results is only one of the requirements. It is necessary to have a good marketing strategy. Getting potential customers to visit your website is only the first step. It is useless to get many visits if customers do not end up buying.
Sustainability
Although SEM allows you to get to the top, you will only be there as long as you can afford it. If budget is not an issue, this type of campaign will do very well. However, if you’re working with a fixed marketing budget, you may want to reconsider. After all, when you stop paying, you will stop appearing in the SERPs.
In SEO, when you reach the desired position for your site, it costs less effort to maintain it. That’s thanks to compounding effects where value is added over time, which helps solidify your position. So as long as you keep optimizing, however little, you will most likely maintain your position. In fact, it’s one of the downsides of being new to the industry. Sites that dominate the top positions seem impossible to knock down. However, think of it this way, with enough effort, that could be you.
SEM can get you results quickly but in the long run a good SEO strategy will save you effort and money.
Visibility
SEM often offers an option to ensure that your ad is targeting the right audience. There are filters available that allow you to select who you want your ad to be visible to. Filters include location, age, device, language and more. This is a necessity in SEM because each click costs money and therefore you want clicks with a high probability of conversion.
SEO consists of carefully crafted strategies to ensure that the right audience interacts with the site. So, to some extent, it is meant to be visible to targeted users. However, this is often not the case. SEO does not have the level of control that SEM has and therefore has a wider audience. This may sound good, but it actually contributes to getting buried under other, more general search results. Also, you will always want to attract the right visitors.
So, in this respect, SEM allows you to sectorize the audience you want to reach whereas with SEO this is not the case.
Return on Investment
SEM requires an ongoing expense to keep the campaign running. This means that the results you get will only be there as long as you keep feeding money into the search engines. For this reason, the cost per lead for paid advertising is much higher than SEO.
SEO is more likely to generate a higher ROI than SEM, as long as it is well optimized. Although it costs money, it is comparatively lower and, therefore, you will run less risk when deploying an SEO campaign. Also, since the cost per lead is lower, the ROI is higher.
Control
SEM provides greater control over most aspects of the ad, so campaigns can be adjusted for a more successful outcome. This means you can tailor your message for a more localized or personalized user experience. You can even include images and other elements that are more engaging and useful. The budget is also under the marketer’s control. This allows you to spend more money on campaigns that are successful and cut back on unsuccessful ones. And since you can control virtually every aspect of the ad, SEM is perfect for testing which ones work and which ones don’t.
On the other hand, the controllability of SEO pales in comparison to SEM. First of all, the format in which it delivers a message is therefore confined to the search engine. In addition, SEO marketers are limited to text-based search results only. And above all, it takes time for the impact of the campaign to emerge, which makes SEO not ideal for testing.
How do SEO and SEM complement each other?
Both SEO and SEM rely heavily on keywords to drive traffic to companies’ websites and web pages. Although the marketing techniques used for each are different, both focus on traffic flows and how these relate to marketing activities. People will use search engines to look for something they are interested in, and they may find it through organic results (SEO) or through paid results (SEM).
Most people search the Internet before they buy anything, so having a prominent presence in search is crucial and using a strategic combination of both can increase your visibility in the long run.
SEO is for organic traffic, i.e. free or unpaid listings, and SEM is for targeted ads that you pay for. They can be complementary, but only if the website itself is SEO-friendly in the first place, then SEM has a better chance of success.
SEO is the foundation of good SEM and, when each is set up well, there is a better chance of getting high quality traffic and improving conversion rates. Once you have an SEO-optimized website and properly targeted sponsored ads with the right keywords, you have a better chance of appearing at the top of paid searches. However, for Google to consider your website credible, it needs to be well optimized for SEO.
If your website is newer, you may want to prioritize your PPC campaign first, as SEO rankings can take a while to establish, but don’t ignore SEO during this process.
When to focus on SEO?
You have a very limited budget: If you have a startup or small business with a modest marketing budget, you may want to focus on SEO. You may not see a return on investment in your SEO budget for months or years. But it still makes more sense than spending your entire marketing budget on PPC ads that may only last a week.
You can rank for informational keywords: Informational keywords are terms like “What is X” or “How to do X.” Although these types of searches don’t convert very well, they have a lot of search volume. So if you think you can write quality content on topics that customers search for on Google, SEO is probably your best bet.
You can wait: SEO and content marketing take time to kick in. So if you can play the long game and wait 6 to 12 months to see legitimate traffic start coming in from Google search, opt for SEO.
You’re good at link building: Creating high-quality content is a key part of ranking in Google. But it’s not enough. If you’re serious about ranking, you’ll also need to use different link building strategies to get other sites to link to you.
When to opt for SEM
You have a good budget: One of the nice things about PPC ads is that you can set a strict budget. This way, it’s impossible to overspend.
That said: it’s easy to burn through that budget quickly if you don’t know what you’re doing (and if you’re just getting started with paid ads, you won’t).
Which means you need a regular monthly budget that you can play around with to figure out what combination of keywords, ad copy, landing pages and bids work best for you.
You can manage an Adwords account: At first glance, PPC seems pretty straightforward. Bid on keywords. Get traffic.
But in practice, managing a Google Ads account is not so simple. You have to take into account keyword targeting, ads, Quality Score, ROI, conversion rates… and process all this data to make decisions on how to get the most out of your ads.
You have the ability to experiment with landing pages: One of the first things you will learn about PPC is that you need specific landing pages for each ad. Or at least for each ad group. So to get the most out of PPC, you need a way to quickly launch a bunch of different landing pages. And run A/B tests to find out which one works best.
