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The online environment offers quite a few options for advertising and ultimately getting traffic. All the different techniques, approaches, and methods fall under the umbrella of Internet Marketing. There are really a lot of different advertising approaches within the sphere of Internet Marketing which is why it is difficult for people new to this to understand and adapt to the situation.
Search engines are the starting point for most users when it comes to Internet use and this makes them the biggest traffic accumulators. Now, it is only natural that most businesses would like to tap into this traffic and reach new customers.
Both SEO and SEM are intended to help businesses get a piece of that search engine traffic but what’s the difference between them? This is something that we will attempt to shed some light on in this article!
SEM (Search Engine Marketing) includes all legitimate approaches for getting traffic to your website via search engines. One of the things SEM is focused on is SEO (Search Engine Optimization) which itself is focused on optimizing a particular web presence to rank better in search engine queries through non-manipulative methods – in other words, it goes after organic traffic through methods not deemed as manipulation by search engines.
Even though SEO is viewed as a form of marketing most of the time, the truth is that any and every website out there needs this form of optimization. Regardless of your ambitions to promote your website through other means, SEO is there to ensure that your website is indexed, not marked as spam, that people can find it when they search for it or the terms it is related to, etc. The better the optimization, the bigger the chances that you will rank high in SERP (Search Engine Result Pages) for your target keyword and ultimately reach your desired audience.
SEM does the same but it also includes using paid solutions to reach search engine traffic.
The problem with SEO is that nobody can really guarantee a particular result. The algorithms search engines use are kept under the veil of secrecy so as to avoid manipulation and to protect the integrity of their SERPs. Still, there are some guidelines you can definitely rely on when doing SEO. Advanced SEO methods tend to be case related or attributed to a style of a particular marketer, which he or she developed through extensive testing and experimentation.
The two basic categories upon which SEO is built are :
On-Site Optimization
Off-Site Optimization
Basically, the point of SEO is to provide search engines with enough information about the content and website function, as well as its value to the inquiring users. After this, search engines will rank the particular website or its content to a particular position in SERPs for relevant queries.
There are statistical facts that show us exactly why SEO is so important. At the bare minimum, 75% of all SERP traffic is retained to the first page. The 1st position gets somewhere around 30% of that traffic, the 2nd around 15%, the 3rd 9%, and the rest share significantly smaller chunks of traffic.
This means that, in theory, if a particular query gets 1000 visitors, and if you are ranking first, you would get somewhere around 300 visitors to your website. That’s huge!
While all this may seem great, you have to understand that ranking to the 1st position of almost any query is very difficult and can take years. SEO is something you do continuously over time and reap the benefits down the line. Still, once you start ranking well, the position is yours for as long as you remain the most relevant result (which usually doesn’t change overnight).
As we already stressed, SEM is a broader term than SEO and includes some additional methods of gaining search engine traffic. You can use regular paid channels to get, not ranking, but ad placements within search engines. They are charged on a PPC basis (Pay Per Click) in order to ensure that companies pay only for the exposure that gets them traffic.
Still, not all PPC falls under SEM. Facebook Ads are also PPC, but this is very different from search engine marketing. Facebook Ads are introduced to people while they are browsing their feed, messages and so on. SEM ads, on the other hand, are displayed to people who have searched for something specific and therefore have an inclination to be interested in what the advertised party has to offer.
Extensive keyword research is usually required in order to organize and run a successful SEM campaign. We know that keywords are important for SEO, but why are they important for paid advertising on search engines. Well, they are the basic tool you use to find the queries that your target is interested in.
Using keywords in PPC is crucial and there are two factors that you need to look into when doing this.
One big factor when picking the keywords to target is keyword seasonality. Not all keywords will have a consistent search volume throughout the year. For example, the keyword “Christmas presents” is going to have very few queries during the summer but, come winter (or even autumn), you can expect it to rack up traffic like crazy.
So, be careful which keywords you pick since they impact everything from your ads’ relevance and how many people convert, to the price you pay for a single ad click; everything!
Finally, we can’t really talk about SEM and not touch the subject of the price. CPC or Cost-per-click is a big factor in this approach since it limits you to how many clicks you can get within your budget. A bunch of factors can impact CPC and here are some of them:
This is where things become tricky. You need to be really careful when calculating your ROI. If your clicks end up converting less than you intended, you stand to lose money. Still, few people get it right on the first try and, as with most marketing approaches, it takes some testing and experimentation to find what is working for your particular situation.
Well, this depends. I know people would like a straightforward, go-for-this-thing type of answer but it all depends on what you are trying to do and how much money you have to spend.
SEO is a long-term investment (and don’t be confused, it definitely isn’t free unless you intend to be a one-man army) which is focused on putting your website in a better position naturally. Still, this will take some time to achieve and even more time to reap its benefits.
SEM offers you a way to reach exactly the traffic you are searching for but this traffic may end up costing you an arm and a leg. Still, in some cases, it beats leaving your online presence dead in the water while you strive to rank it well and get that organic traffic. In some situations, doing PPC and SEM can help you identify the best queries you might want to attempt to rank for naturally by using SEO. If you are asking about the difference between SEO and PPC that’s a whole other story.
If you would like us to declare a clear winner, we would have to go with SEO just because it is an essential and SEM is an optional approach. Still, SEO isn’t superior to SEM; it does different things at a different pace and the fact that it is still very much a popular marketing approach is a clear indicator that it provides value to the people using it. Being that they both focus on getting traffic from search engines, if one was superior, one would definitely have become obsolete by now and put out of use.
We hope we managed to help you understand the differences between SEO and SEM as well as their uses, strengths, and weaknesses. Feel free to post your questions below. What is your experience with SEM and SEO and how did their effectiveness compare to each other? Do you do both or just one? Also, if you have the time, fill out the form below. It would mean a lot to us! Have a great day!
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