Search marketing is a marketing strategy that helps you get your website or brand the required attention and traffic. It will help you bring your content to the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs) and increase your content's visibility.
What is Search Marketing?
The two main categories of search marketing are:
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
SEO is a marketing strategy to optimize your site to get organic and free traffic through search engines. To get noticed and distinguished from your online competitors, you must get your product ranked in one of the top 5 search engine results. SEO plays a vital role in helping you achieve this goal. The web search engine crawlers can quickly figure out an SEO optimized website and provide it, its needed recognition, which can get the website ranked higher in SERPs.
What is Search Engine Marketing (SEM)?
SEM is a marketing strategy to increase your site’s visibility and to attract a fair amount of potential audience. SEM gets its traffic through SEO and PPC (Pay per Click), i.e., SEO falls under SEM. In simpler words, SEM uses paid and unpaid tactics and strategies to generate organic and paid traffic and gain visibility in SERPs.
SEO vs. SEM: The Differences
When comparing the two, SEO and SEM, you will notice many similarities and the difference that overlaps or separates the two. Discussed below are some of the differences that will help you distinguish between SEO and SEM.
– The “Ad” designation:
As mentioned earlier, SEM is a paid strategy; therefore, its search placements have an ad extension. Whereas there are no such extensions or arrangements on SEO sites, instead, there are featured snippets.
– Cost:
To apply SEM as strategy, you have to pay. In this way, your brand or website is charged some amount for every click it gets. You must have a reasonable budget if you plan on incorporating this marketing strategy. However, with SEO, you do not need to pay anything as it is optimization that you provide your website for an organic audience.
– Target audience/Potential customers:
With SEM, you can reach out to a specific target audience and your potential clients since you can easily filter your audience. SEO does not assure you that it will show your content.
– Efficiency:
SEM has an immediate response and impact on your traffic and revenue. With a couple of clicks, your website will be visible to many. But SEO helps you and assists you over time; it can take months or years to get ranked well; basically, it adds value with time.
– Testing:
SEM is observed to be better for testing purposes since you can turn the ads on and off to check the difference. With SEO, you can do no such thing since it is not flexible enough to modify and make immediate changes.
SEO vs. SEM: Which is better?
To pick the best platform for your brand, you must know who your competition is, what benefits them, and how they are marketing their product. Understand your customers’ requirement and their urgency for the work. Consider your business’s age and the budget for PPC that you can afford or your industry offers. Remember that there is no answer to the question of which is better. Some brands are benefiting from SEO and some from SEM. Sometimes some even use the combination of SEO and SEM. It all depends on you, your site, and your goals. Hopefully, the insights discussed above will help you establish and flourish your website at the earliest.
