SEO vs SEM:
Being on Search is the most important aspect of any business with an online presence. When it comes to Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM), we often see that business owners are confused as to what is best for their business objectives. To break all sorts of dilemmas, we have come up with a blog to explain each of them and the advantages they offer as per the business type.
Search Engine Optimisation and Search Engine marketing are well known to all. A brief difference chart is below.
| SEO | SEM |
| Need not pay for clicks | Need to pay for website clicks |
| Time taking results | Quick results |
| Long term benefits | Short Term Benefits |
| Need less marketing Budget | Need higher Budgets compared to SEO |
| Done through quality content and practices | Done through Google Ads |
| Results may be restricted to regions. | Can be geographically targeted |
Search Engine Optimization
Making a website relevant to Google to bring it to the first page has different components. Having quality content, keywords, page speed, meta descriptions, titles, headings etc are some of the factors that Google takes into consideration to increase the domain authority and relevance of your website.
Apart from the quality of the website, having backlinks from high authoritative websites, Social sharing, Google My Business listing with good reviews etc increases the score.
Search Engine Marketing
Google Ads gives the opportunity to display the ads right in front of the audience when they are looking for a related product or service on the web. This often results in more clicks to your website and conversions.
What is best for your business? SEO or SEM or both?
Having known the basics of SEO & SEM, jumping to the conclusion that SEO is better is easy. However, only the top 5 organic listings get 60.7% of the clicks. And 75% of the users never go past the first page on Google. So depending solely on SEO to stay on the first page is a risky business.
For new businesses: Google Ads is the best way to drive quality traffic and make conversions. During this time, relying only on SEO may be of little help as it takes a long time to bring your website to the first page of the Search Engine Rankings. SEO is always a suggested long term strategy to build traffic.
For an established business: Having a good SEO strategy helps in getting consistent traffic for free. By targeting the right keywords and earning a place in the organic results, businesses can get traffic everyday consistently. Here, SEM can be used for competitive keywords, or for those important pages which are not ranking on the first page.
How can we help
Analysing the needs of the business and aligning with the objectives is important in deciding the right strategy for any business. That is where Digital Marketing Consultants like us come into place.
We have designed a customized solution called “Be On Search” to help businesses who are not sure of what strategy to use in order to be visible and get traffic to their website. Be On Search is nothing but our strategic implementation, which balances SEO, SEM, and the most important Google My Business to improve visibility, get traffic, and drive conversions.
Contact us to get a customized Be On Search Plan for your business and take our service to grow website visits, walk-ins, and inquiries for your business.