Is SEO or SEM a better strategy for your business?

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) involve tasks that help search engines such as Google find and rank a website through organic and paid methods by applying a set of specific keywords to each campaign. When a user searches for information related to a business, a solid search engine strategy will help position the information they are looking for at the top of the page and improve the website's ranking. In this article, I will discuss the difference between SEM and SEO, when to apply each tactic, how they complement each other, and why they should be included within your digital marketing plan to drive business growth and customer acquisition goals.

Search Engine Marketing

SEM campaigns consist of paid efforts and online advertising tools, such as Google AdWords, through tactics such as pay-per-click (PPC), retargeting and Facebook Ads. The objective of incorporating SEM strategies within your digital marketing plan is to target individuals already motivated to purchase certain products based on their search history to drive business growth and customer acquisition. Since SEM campaigns may require a more substantial budget, it’s essential to ensure that they deliver Return on Investment (ROI). As a result, it makes sense to include SEM campaigns as a conversion strategy by targeting users who are ready to purchase by measuring the quality of keywords used from users’ search history.

Search Engine Marketing: Retargeting Strategy

An example of an SEM strategy is Search Retargeting which can be achieved through display advertising. Retargeting is a cookie-based technology that anonymously follows your audience around the internet. To serve ads to each user as they browse the internet, a piece of code must be placed on your website. Each user is required to visit your website initially, or you must have access to each user’s email address. Although retargeting is a powerful branding tool to help increase web traffic and conversion rates, it’s not reliable unless it’s used as part of a coordinated campaign to drive traffic. To build an effective SEM Search Retargeting campaign, it’s critical to:

• Create relevant sets of evergreen and seasonal keywords that mirror each campaign objective and measure results frequently.

• Categories each set of keywords under a specific ad group (you can have multiple ad groups under each campaign; each set of keywords has to be treated uniquely)
  

Search Engine Optimisation

Search Engine Optimisation is an organic and algorithm-based method used to help websites obtain a high ranking on a search engine results page like Google. Organic SEO can help improve a site’s page rank by:

• Generating more website traffic and engagement

• It builds trust among the users and is very cost-effective compared to SEM

• Optimising each landing page by mainly relying on the relevancy of high-quality and relevant content

• Backlinking to spread links pointing to the content

• Incorporating meta tags and other types of tag attributes
  

Search Engine Optimisation: Affiliate Marketing Strategy

Affiliate marketing is a performance-based marketing strategy in which a business compensates the affiliate with a percentage of all sales conversions generated through the affiliate’s marketing efforts. One of the most common affiliate marketing strategies is creating a bespoke product review in return for a commission on products sold. The objective is to produce valuable content that provides solutions to help users reach their goals. When creating an off-page SEO campaign, it’s essential to include a UTM code and an affiliate link on the content page to measure each movement and help optimise the website in search engine results. A UTM code is a custom URL that can be attached to a custom code to track a source, medium and campaign within Google Analytics. Adding a UTM code to your content page will allow you to track where searchers came from and what campaign directed them to you.

How SEO and SEM can be used together

When used correctly, SEO and SEM are more vital than individually. SEO rewards you with organic traffic, and SEM helps you create more effective and targeted advertising campaigns with keywords that don’t rank organically. Using SEO and SEM together will help you measure which part of your marketing strategy needs improvement through Google Analytics. In addition, Google Analytics will help determine which keywords have been successful. As a result, you can reuse the most successful keywords throughout your website and incorporate them into meta descriptions and text that appears below your website name. Be mindful of keyword stuffing by prioritising the overall quality of your content; Google will notice and decrease your SERP rankings in addition to slapping you with penalties.

SEO and SEM: Keywords

Since users use keywords to help them find pages on Google, you must regularly research and update the keywords. SEO can be very effective for driving traffic, but it’s hard to see results when you’re frequently updating your keywords quickly; that’s why SEO nurturing often takes a few months to generate significant traffic. Although SEM is not free, it can help you drive vast amounts of traffic to your site while you’re waiting for the results of your SEO campaign to start showing results. SEO and SEM aim to acquire short-term and long-term traffic – the short-term goals are related to SEM, and the longer-term goals with SEO.

Once your SEO campaign starts showing results, an SEO and SEM strategy in parallel can lead to maximum traffic and exposure – SEO drives traffic by focusing on the main keywords and SEM for seasonal keywords. The advantage of SEM is that it can drive traffic from highly competitive keywords. Therefore it’s vital to have an intelligent keyword plan instead of using the same search terms in both campaigns.

SEO and SEM: Brand Awareness

Create trust by appearing twice in users’ search results through organic and paid results. A Search Engine Results Page (SERP) will create more brand awareness and amplify your brand’s credibility for the brand that you are more familiar with. According to a study by Nielsen Research, when PPC campaigns are shown alongside their organic listings, the click-through rates of paid ads increase by 32% compared to just relying on organic searches.

SEO and SEM: Link Building

A successful SEO campaign revolves around original and valuable content to encourage shareability and promote your website. Paid ads are a great way to spread awareness and promote your content to plenty of users who would never see it otherwise. Facebook, for example, is a relatively affordable solution by bidding on long-tail, unbranded keywords.

SEO and SEM: Where one fails, the other helps

Since SEO is unreliable and challenging, PPC comes to the rescue as a short-term backup to SEO. The keywords that are worth money but don’t rank organically are the ones that need to be taken advantage of. PPC and SEO can work great together if you know where your strengths are in each one.

References:

1. Laura Sánchez-Crespo, How to make the most of your SEM campaigns for eCommerce, 2018. Available at: [https://beeketing.com/blog/sem-campaigns-ecommerce/ ]

2. Dax Hamman, How to maximise SEM efforts with search retargeting, 2011. Available at [https://searchengineland.com/how-to-maximize-sem-efforts-with-search-retargeting-86137]

3. Techopedia, Organic Search Engine Optimization (Organic SEO), 2019. Available at: [https://www.techopedia.com/definition/5184/organic-search-engine-optimization-organic-seo]

4. Juan Pablo Castro, Why SEO & SEM Are Complementary, Not Independent, 2016. Available at: [https://landerapp.com/blog/why-seo-sem-are-complementary/]