SEO and SEM are the fundamental pillars of any digital marketing strategy. Even though both are closely related to each other, they are two different marketing approaches. It is important to clear up the common misconceptions about both of them, which is our today’s quest.
Both help your website rank in search engines, but they differ in many ways. This article will help you clear out common misconceptions and build strong foundations.
SEO refers to improving your website’s ranking on the search engine. The goal is to generate high-quality leads and drive organic traffic that can yield monetary benefits in one way or another.
There are over 200 factors that must be considered to ensure an efficient SEO campaigns. But it all trickles down to how well you serve your audience.
SEM is used for promotion and advertising to help companies be visible in SERPs. It includes paid mediums like PPC, which are used to achieve the desired result quickly.
SEM is based on keyword analysis, and different campaigns are designed to test their effectiveness.
Regardless, both are different terminologies, but they do share many commonalities, such as:
Here is a quick glimpse of what to expect from this blog.
Factors | SEO | SEM |
Major focus | Organic results | Paid results |
Technique | Free or organic | Pay per click |
Result appearance | In the middle of paid results, as organically ranked results. | At the top and bottom of a SERP. Appears as an ad. |
Value over time | If content is written well, it offers higher ROI in the long run. | If the ad is written well, it offers short and immediate results. |
Time taken to show the result | SEO is a timely process and could take at least 6 months to show results. | Quick and instant results can be gained via SEM. |
Cost | No spending is involved. | You pay for every click that your ad receives. |
Specialty | Let you rank organically. Results can be yielded depending on the keywords used and the SEO strategy implemented. | Improves your sales for the time you run your ad. |
Google hasn’t officially announced any ranking factors, but industry experts believe there are 200 plus such factors in SEO. There are three major areas to consider in Search Engine Optimization.
On-page SEO refers to optimizing a website and its content for search engines and end users. This includes tasks such as user search intent, site architecture, URL optimization, quality content, mobile friendliness, and many other factors.
The factors are mentioned below. Each point must be studied in detail and entails strategies and best practices.
Off-page SEO refers to techniques that build authority and credibility in Google’s eyes. Your focus must be on Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) principles. Google uses these principles as quality raters and ranks you accordingly.
The major factors that affect your off-page SEO include:
This technique helps you optimize your website to facilitate search engines in crawling, indexing, and ranking it against certain search terms is known as technical SEO. Technical SEO is concerned with crawling, indexing, and ranking of the website. This seems simple, but you need to understand how Google sees your content and how it functions. Understanding the basis of NLP, AI, and ML commendably helps you boost your technical SEO, but you still can survive if you don’t have time or don’t know such technicalities.
The major things affecting your technical SEO are:
In such a fast-paced digital world and with so much competition, it’s more necessary than ever to advertise online and quickly reach your audience. Search engine marketing is one of the best available mediums to reach your desired audience.
The goal in SEM is to guide users to a landing page where they can purchase and complete the buying cycle. SEM works on bidding model, where amount and the quality of your ad decide the placement of the ad. The major concepts involved in PPC are:
Keyword analysis is the heart of PPC. Targeting the keywords your desired audience is searching for would be best. The advertiser can select to target a keyword exactly or do it semantically. You can also target negative keywords to get more accurate results.
Advertisers set a budget and then participate in the auction, bidding on a particular keyword. Depending on the bid and ad’s quality, Google will place your ad on the SERP.
Budgets are set according to the level of campaign, and bids are set at the keyword level.
It refers to the ad’s relevance to the search query and typed keyword. Factors affecting your quality score include CTR, ad relevance, and landing page experience.
You can optimize your ad by targeting it based on device, location, day and time, and demographics.
Your ad copy also plays an important role in building this sales funnel. While it all trickles down to the conversion, your ad can do.
Both approaches focus on bringing traffic, but the major difference is how fast.
SEO takes time, but SEM gives quick yet costly results. If you follow the right approach with the best SEO practices, then you will start seeing results within a few weeks to 6 months.
Conversely, if you focus on SEM, you get results almost immediately. You just need to test out your campaigns and best-performing keywords. You can see results within as short as 2 to 3 weeks.
It’s not a simple, straightforward question to answer. The cost of SEO and SEM depends on many factors.
SEO seems cost-effective, and you can enjoy long-term traffic, but it takes a lot of effort, time and money to rank these keywords. If you can do SEO, even then, you would be paying for hefty tools, consistently learning search engine algorithms and tweaking your campaign accordingly.
furthermore, you must hire a team if you can’t do SEO yourself. This team should at least comprise of an SEO expert, a writer, and someone to look after your website, and you would also need to buy the tools. moreover, you will also need a social media manage and graphic designer.
In SEO, you need to burn the cash slowly, but in SEM, you spend it up-front. Again, if you know how SEM works and how you can set up a campaign, you would only be left with the per-click cost. But if you go toward hiring an expert, it will cost you more.
The cost of SEM also depends on the keywords you are targeting. Keywords which have high traffic are generally more competitive. Your campaign scale, advertising strategy, development of landing pages and copywriting, and management fee, all decide your SEM cost.
There is no cookie-cutter approach, and it entirely depends on your goals.
SEO is a viable option if you want a long-term organic ranking and have patience. Likewise, if you run a small or midsize business with limited budget, SEO should be your tactic for targeted marketing. Similarly, SEO is the way to go if you are targeting worldwide market, as it lets you rank against high-search volume keywords. SEO can also be a good bet if you are looking to build links and gain authority in the eyes of search engines.
Conversely, if you want immediate results, you must opt for SEM. The important thing to mention here is that you must have a consistent ad budget to play around and look for keywords that work for you. It is relatively easy to burn out while running PPC ads as the cost per click is skyrocketing. Moreover, you must be able to run a Google Ads account to manage your campaigns. Likewise, you must be able to launch and test your landing pages.
To win in such a competitive online world, you must choose a marketing strategy that covers all fronts. Both methods complement each other and should be utilized side by side to gain optimum results. Both require particular knowledge with particular skillset and if you lack them both can only be a wastage of time.
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SEO is the method of organically boosting a website’s ranking on the search engine through different techniques.
Search engine marketing includes both paid (PPC) and unpaid (SEO) methods to rank a website higher on search engines.
There are several tools that can be utilized to search the right keywords, such as:
Although, in most cases, SEO manages to achieve desired results, there is no guarantee that your website will rank on the first page of the SERP.
Normally, SEO can take up to 3-6 months to show results, while SEM will begin showing results immediately.
Google Crawler or Google Spider is an automated program that browses websites and indexes them in its large database.
A paid advertisement will display your ad at the top or bottom of the results page for the searches made against your related keywords.
SEM has 3 main components, i.e.: