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Let’s begin by understanding the term digital marketing. It’s a marketing strategy that helps brands and companies use internet-connected devices to connect with potential customers.
What are search engines? These programs are used to conduct a web search that matches specified criteria.
Search engines work in three steps: Crawling, also known as spiders or robots, is used to discover new web pages, and Indexing is the second, where the search engine decides whether the chosen web page is worthy of being added to the index. The third stage is ranking. In this stage, information is retrieved, sorted, and tagged according to the best site.
I’ll discuss two types of digital marketing in this article: Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
What are SEM and SEO?
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is a type of digital marketing that strategizes on getting your brand or webpage a higher ranking on search engines. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a process of marketing that improves traffic on your website to increase its visibility on search engines like Google and Microsoft Bing.
Both are great ways to grow your website visits during this digital era. But what is their difference? One notable difference is when visiting a website using SEO, you don’t need to pay once you click on the search result, but for SEM, payment is required to ensure your website is featured on search engine result pages.
Below, we’ll discuss how SEM and SEO work, their differences and similarities, and which is better.
Search Engine Marketing helps their customers reach their attention through pay-per-click marketing. Marketers pay every time someone clicks their ads, ranking them higher on search engine result pages (SERPs).
SEM focuses on keyword research analysis and tools. This means specific keywords must be used to attract their targeted audience to their webpage. Using tools like Google Ads Keyword Planner, Google Trends, and Clearscope is an excellent way to identify keywords likely to cause website traffic for your brand and avoid using negative keywords.
When using Google Ads as your SEM platform, you’ll need to define compatible keywords for your website. You can opt for a broad match, meaning synonyms can display your ad. You can use only specific keywords to make your ad appear on the search engine. concordance.
Most SEM ads are placed at the top of the result page just before the search results from the SEO. These ads have distinct characteristics to help you differentiate them from the organic results. These include titles, a meta description which is the content summary of the webpage, visible URL hyperlinks, and calls to action.
Products are arranged into campaigns that house brands that advertise similar goals. For example, a campaign can include one company that sells coats, another could have boots, and another have umbrellas used during the rainy season.
When setting up a campaign, remember to select keywords related to your brand or products being sold, add a location to which your ad will be displayed, add a price you’re willing to pay per click, and bid. Also, create an ad that will be displayed in the organic results. Use text-based ads since they are easy to make, and add links.
After a client has clicked on the ad, they are taken to a landing page. You can maximize the use of your landing page and optimize it to ensure you get conversions and your visitor has taken specific actions, e.g., filling out a form to download an ebook.
Importance of SEM
Why is SEM important for your brand? I want to discuss how you benefit from it below.
- With most people purchasing goods online, SEM strategies aim to reach more people using keywords that generate highly qualified traffic to ensure your customers make a purchase. This is because they use the most profitable keywords in the digital market.
- As mentioned above, most SEM ads are placed before the search results. This is a great advantage for companies whose product ads pop first on the search engine. There’s a high chance that the client will click on their ad if they need to purchase a service or product. This reincreased high conversion rates for the brand involved.
- Using Google Analytics will give a detailed analysis of your SEM campaigns. This will help the organization understand its strengths and weaknesses and how to improve them for a better campaign.
- When a company’s name is ranked high due to its paid ad, there’s an increase in traffic on its site which, with time, becomes permanent. This increases product rates, and no more SEM is required since Google ranks it high organically due to its good performance on SERP.
Disadvantages of SEM
SEM also has its disadvantages which include:
- Competition from other companies makes it complicated, challenging, and expensive to remain at the top of SERP.
- Over time, even with affordable sites like PPC, paying your ad every time a client clicks is expensive.
- Customers do not trust ads generated on their search results since they are disruptive, and most end up blocking them using ad blockers.
It is good to know that when you stop paying your bids, your website can’t be seen anymore, and your traffic will lessen.
How SEO works
You aim to increase website traffic and orders when managing a business online. You’ll need to be visible on Google, Yahoo, or Bling to optimize your page for higher rankings and more visibility.
Now let’s understand how SEO optimization works.
SEO has three central pillars you need to familiarize yourself with that will help you optimize your content
- On-Page Optimization
Using relevant keywords and tags in your content increases the chance of being ranked first on SERP. Use quality content and meta descriptions and optimize images with Alt tags.
- Off-Page Optimization
This is using built backlinks on relevant sites where users are more active. This means that reliable websites market your website by mentioning it in their content.
- Technical Optimization
It makes a website more understandable, well-organized, and displayed for search engines. They also prevent technical issues that may prevent the site from being ranked first.
SEO is challenging since its strategies change constantly, so you must continually be updated to succeed.
With SEO changing so often and depending on your strategy, it might take some time. It’s good to remember that being reluctant to change will kick you off the top of SERP fast.
Factors To Help You Improve Your SEO
- You need to plan your content to engage your audience: This attracts most customers to your website because the content is the core component of SEO in the market. Please learn how to create, develop, and promote your content to get maximum traffic and revenue from your website. Your content must be educational, relevant, and entertaining. It’s good to know that using the main types of content, like videos, blogs, social media posts, infographics, etc., helps you make your content more appropriate and shareable around more people.
- Use of keywords: These keywords must be well-researched and sensibly used to be effective. Remember to use keywords with high search rates and low competition to offer value to your business.
- Use SEO-friendly header tags: They help your content look relevant. Headers must include hyperlinked title tags and meta descriptions. Please ensure your users know what to expect after clicking on your site.
Importance of SEO
- Increases web traffic. The most common reason for using SEO for marketers is to ensure they get web traffic and a prominent place on the SERP. This helps to keep up with upcoming competition from other websites.
- Gives better ranking and visibility. Most people who research online use the top 10 Google results on the result page. SEO helps your webpage rank highest amongst your competitors. This brings visibility to your website.
- SEO helps track your website’s performance. You can monitor the effects of SEO on your web page according to the latest industry trends and use them to grow your website.
- SEO is cost-effective. Compared to SEM, which needs you to pay per click. SEO doesn’t need any money for paid advertising; you use relevant and well-researched keywords to rank your web page higher than others.
- Provides long-term results. Once your website ranks high on the result page for some time, it becomes more trusted and credible to many customers. This continues even after you’ve stopped using SEO for marketing.
Similarities between SEO and SEM?
SEO and SEM have a lot in common. Below are a few similarities::
- They depend on search engines to drive quality and relevant website traffic.
- They use specific, well-researched keywords to drive traffic to a webpage.
- Both improve the visibility of a site from both organic and paid searches.
- While using SEM and SEO, website owners need to understand their audiences’ needs.
- Both need the website owners to be updated and ongoing optimization to keep the sites at the top of search engine result pages.
SEO vs. SEM: What Is Their Difference
Time Taken To See Results
For results to be portrayed on your website, SEO will take months or even years to rank top on the result pages. However, in a few months, you can see results using well-researched keywords and applying SEO best practices.
For SEM, you will be able to see traffic on your website after just a short period, but SEO will have a long period of constant traffic and a positive Return On Investment (ROI).
Remember, SEM works faster than SEO but provides seasonal results, while SEO may take a long time to work but provide long-lasting results. Additionally, for SEO to work in your favor, you must have an excellent budget.
How Much They Cost
Since SEM doesn’t have a pay-per-click option, most people think it’s free, but it’s far from free. For your site to rank first on the resulting page, money, effort, and resources are required. You’ll need a lot of time to write a post, money to pay for an SEO tool, graphic designs, and even developers to code your page.
Even after all that effort, your website is not guaranteed to rank first. For this reason, most websites would prefer PPC since you are guaranteed to have some results after paying your bids.
For the short term, SEM is cheaper than SEO, though SEO is better for a long time since when you rank high, you do not need that much money to maintain your place.
Ideally, using both SEO and SEM is not such a bad idea.
Testing
SEM is suitable for testing your website. You can set the ads on and off. This must be done on something else.
Click-Through rate (CTR)
This is the number of web page visitors who click on a hypertext link to that particular site. CTR is higher in SEO than SEM.
Let’s try to understand when to use each type of digital marketing.
When To Focus on SEO
Using SEO is your best option with a limited budget, especially when starting up a business. SEM can be good, but just for a short time, since you’ll end up not affording it, SEO takes time to kick in, but once it does, it gives long-term results, and that’s what you want for your business.
When To Focus on SEM
With SEM it is almost impossible to overspend on advertising. This will happen if you set up a strict monthly ad budget. Use targeted keywords, ads, ROI, and conversion rates to analyze data and decide how to maximize the use of ads.
Conclusion
Managing a business online can be tricky, especially now that competition is high. Please understand what your business involves and how to use digital marketing to better your brand or website.
Understand your customers to ensure you use the correct type of digital marketing. Remember, you can use both SEM and SEO to increase the visibility of your website so it ranks high on SERP. It’s also good to know that results will take time, especially if you are using SEO.
Choose a marketing strategy that will benefit your business for a long time and matches your budget. Research keywords that increase traffic on your page to ensure you remain on top of the result pages.