When it comes to sem vs seo, it is not only about getting your website to show up on search engines, but it is also about credibility, user experience, and, ultimately, conversion. They are about making sure that when a potential customer looks up something related to your products or services, it is your website that they click on, spend time on, and buy from. It doesn’t matter whether you are a business owner, a product owner, a service-based business, or a website trying to improve your customer acquisition rate; you can leverage SEO and SEM services to get your desired results.
SEM vs SEO – An Overview
If you don’t know what sem vs seo is about, let us explain. If you look for any keyword on a typical search result page, the top of the page usually comprises a few search ads, shopping ads, or a combination of both. Below that, you will usually find ten organic search results. These are pages that focus on optimizing for SEO. Following that, you will find another ad and then related searches.
SEM takes up a huge space in the search results before organic search results are shown. If you search for anything, you will see ads right at the top. Depending on the competition, getting the top position for certain keywords can cost a huge amount of money. The top positions can cost in the high range, and for the ads down below, sometimes as the 11th position and below, it can cost less.
Google, unlike other businesses, needs to profit and grow, which is why search engines earn money by collecting advertising fees from businesses that want to display their products or services on their search engines. With that said, prominent places, such as the top of the search results, are exclusively reserved for sponsored ads.
With billions of searches every day, understandably, not all search terms will render ads. For instance, if someone is searching for technical SEO for beginners, they might not be ready to buy a course yet. So, people searching for specific keywords can have the intention of getting more information or learning something first. Businesses tend to focus on keywords where they know that people are ready to buy products or services.
This is where the term “customer journey” comes in, as a customer will go through different stages, from someone who didn’t know your product existed to eventually buying it. With that said, if you are only focused on search engine marketing, you will only target the group of people who are considering buying a product, but you are essentially neglecting the group of people who can potentially transition into the consideration stage of the customer journey.
With that said, if you are working on your website’s SEO, you can target different groups of people. This aspect indicates why businesses need SEO to increase brand visibility and establish awareness. However, it is important to understand the good, the bad, and the ugly of both marketing tactics.
SEO services and SEM services – The Main Differences
When it comes to seo services and sem services, the main difference is that SEM relies on paid ads, whereas SEO focuses on organic, white-hat tactics to get your website to rank in search engines. You should know that keywords play an important part in both SEO and SEM.
Use of Keywords
In seo and sem services, keywords are important. With SEO, you create content using a target keyword and related keywords. Along with other factors, these keywords help search engines understand your pages so that the pages appear for the right queries. For an SEM campaign, you can bid on certain keywords that are related to your business and appear above the organic search results for those specific keywords.
Demographics
In addition to keywords, your SEM campaign can actually help you reach people based on demographics, previous interactions with your business, and so much more. For instance, if you search on Google using the keyword “weatherproofing home,” you will see a result page that includes both keyword-targeted ads and organic content on weatherization.
Timeline
TimelineSEO takes time, as there is no magic button that will make your strategy work immediately. With that said, you should keep in mind that it can take you six months or even longer to generate and see significant results. This aspect is specifically true if your website is new and if you have never done SEO before.
On the other hand, SEM starts driving results soon after you launch your ad. SEM is a great strategy for driving results within a short time frame. However, you should know that as soon as your campaign ends, the results stop, too, as your ads are no longer in search results. This is where you need SEO. Although it might take some time for SEO to work, once it does start working, you can continue to see great results without putting more money into a campaign.
You should know that SEO does require continuous maintenance. Just because your website was at the top of search results, it doesn’t mean that it will always be in that top spot. This aspect emphasizes the importance of regularly optimizing your web pages to stay ahead of search engine updates and whatever your competitors are doing.
Your website just doesn’t disappear from the search results like an ad would after you have optimized it. Your website might continue to maintain the top spot, earn valuable page traffic, and provide content that helps build solid trust with your target audience.
SEO and SEM Services – Which One Should You Choose?
Let us cut straight to the point: The best you can do is to use SEO and SEM together. If you are just getting started with SEO, SEM can get people on your website and fill in the gaps before your optimization efforts start to pay off. Even if SEO has been a part of your digital marketing for a while, SEM can be great to help you reach a more specific and targeted group of people with your marketing, especially if you are running special deals or promotions over a limited period of time.
When your PPC campaign ends, you will still have SEO in your pocket to continue reaching people online. As more people find you organically, you will form more trusted relationships with your customers, so people know they can come to your business when they are ready to make a purchase.
Difference between SEO and Digital Marketing
SEO and digital marketing are phrases that are used interchangeably; however, they are not quite similar. Both digital marketing vs seo are part of online marketing; however, they are different in the following aspects:
- Goals
- Target audiences
- Strategies
Essentially, digital marketing is the practice of using digital channels to promote products, services, and brands. Digital marketing also uses social media, email, websites, and search engines for the effective promotion of products and services. A wide range of strategies is used, such as content marketing, paid ads, email marketing, and social media marketing.
SEO is a necessary part of digital marketing, where the focus is on website optimization and ranking higher in SERPs for very specific keywords. The specific objective of SEO is to actually revamp the quality and quantity of organic traffic to websites by increasing visibility in search engine results.
Main Goals of Digital Marketing
You should know that the main goals of digital marketing campaigns depend on the budget, business, industry, and target audience. However, the common goals of businesses that integrate digital marketing campaigns include the following:
- Increase brand awareness
- Increase website traffic
- Increase sales
- Establish customer loyalty
- Enhance customer retention
- Generate leads
Now you know that the basic goals of digital marketing include increasing brand awareness, generating leads, increasing brand engagement, increasing sales, and revamping search engine rankings. SEO, paid ads, and content marketing are among the digital marketing strategies that are used to achieve these goals.
Main Goals of SEO
You already know that SEO, or search engine optimization, is actually the practice of website optimization to achieve a higher ranking in SERPs for very specific keywords. The main components of SEO include effective keyword research, on-page optimization, off-page optimization, local SEO, and technical SEO.
Here are the basic goals of SEO:
- Improve website visibility in SERPs
- Increase organic website traffic
- Establish a high website authority
- Establish website credibility
- Improve website user experience
- Generate leads
- Generate sales
Now, you know that the basic goals of SEO include improving your website’s visibility in SERPs, which will essentially lead to an increase in organic website traffic, leads, sales, and revenue.
Scope of Digital Marketing and SEO
Digital marketing and SEO are both crucial aspects of online marketing; however, they are different in their scope. For instance, digital marketing includes a wide range of strategies, channels, and tactics, and it includes everything from SEM to email marketing. On the other hand, SEO is a section of digital marketing that exclusively focuses on website optimization and the website’s higher rankings in search results.
Target Audience of Digital Marketing and SEO
Essentially, digital marketing targets a broader audience, such as those who aren’t actively looking for products or services. You should know that social media marketing can be used to increase brand awareness and also help businesses engage with potential customers who may not yet know about the business. On the other hand, SEO targets people who are looking up specific products and services on Google.
SEM vs SEO – Integrate Both Strategies
When it comes to sem vs seo, Google intentionally makes them look similar, where the only difference is that little “sponsored” word that is up at the top left of the search page. Another difference is that the sponsored results always show up on top of and before the organic results. With that said, as a business owner, you might be wondering whether you should start with Google Ads or SEO. At this point, all you know is that you want more clients, more customers, and more business coming from online.
Now, a lot of business owners think by default that they should start with SEO because, in their minds, SEO feels safer, and they don’t have to pay Google for every single click. It also feels safer because it is a long-term asset that, once you build it up, doesn’t just go away as soon as you stop paying Google for the ads.
You should know that paid ads or SEM are great for a couple of reasons, such as the following:
- Paid ads are measured and predictable
- You can turn paid ads on and off in small increments
On the other hand, with SEO, until you are on the first page of Google, you are getting zero results. Suppose you are on page two and you hire an SEO agency to do your SEO, and after a couple of months, you might still not be on the first page of Google. Google keeps regularly updating its algorithm, and every time an update happens, all the SEO work that you might have done on your business over the last six months might get wiped out.
The only good way to have a good, long-term SEO is to actually be a successful, profitable, well-known business that other companies naturally refer people to, and people actually want to come to your website and read through it. This aspect perfectly illustrates why you have to strategize your SEO with ads or SEM.
Final Thoughts
The thing about sem vs seo is that SEO is a long-term strategy, which, over time, if successful, will have a lower cost per conversion than SEM. Now, SEM will drive leads immediately, but you will have to constantly and forever spend money on it to see results. If you stop spending money on ads, your leads will dry up. Eventually, with SEO, you will stop spending money on it, and the leads won’t dry up. The best you can do is to use SEO and SEM together and establish a more effective and comprehensive online presence.
FAQs
Is SEM paid?
SEM refers to paid search advertising, which is also known as PPC.
Is SEO paid?
SEO is essentially about the process of acquiring traffic and establishing visibility through unpaid and paid efforts. SEO is the unpaid tactic; whereas, SEM is the paid tactic.
What is SERP in SEO?
SERP is a short way to describe “search engine results page”, which is actually the page that is displayed by Google or other search engines after online users enter a keyword or a search query.
