SEO VS. SEM: Which Is The Best Investment?

As a business organization and always thinking about generating more revenue every year, we always think of taking the most cost-effective way with enhanced ROI to market your business.

But when it comes down to selecting one from SEO and SEM, it becomes one of the toughest decisions to make. Both SEO and SEM effectively bring new audiences to the business and keep the business rolling.

In fact, choosing one has become so difficult that if someone is opening a local small business in the Philippines, they are using both to compete on the bigger stage.

Seeing how people are still divided on the matter of SEO and SEM, we thought of taking this opportunity to teach our readers something important like the difference between SEO and SEM. 

What Is SEO?

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the practice that includes publishing optimized content to the website with the potential of getting visibility on search engines. That means, if you can optimize your website and content in the right way, your website can rank for multiple searches.

While we are talking about optimizing your website as per SEO, there are a few things that you can look into.

• Content - You must ensure that your content is informative and offers something valuable to the readers.
• Website Design - Your website is the face of your business. If your website looks bad or has an overlapping design, it can overwhelm the user. They might come out of the website with a not-so-good experience.
• Include Relevant Keywords - Keywords are important to rank on search engines. Whether you are writing website content, blogs or articles, all your content needs to be optimized for keywords. Only then will you rank on search engines.

Pros

• Establish Brand Credibility: For most people, the most credible websites are those websites that constantly rank on the top pages. So, if you want to get a piece of the market for your business, you need to hit those first-page results. This is where SEO helps the business optimize its content and website for better results.
• Cost-Effective: SEO is cost-effective. Why? Because the results are not affected by paying any money but with the right SEO optimization. You just need to optimize your website and content as per SEO. The rest of the work will be done by the SEO itself.
• Raise Brand Awareness: If you are thinking about long-term results, nothing can beat SEO. SEO can help build a foundation that will help with brand awareness for years to come.

Cons

• It Takes Time To Produce Results: Yes, it is true! SEO is more of a slow starter and takes time to produce any results. Even if we are talking about a minimum span for producing any results, it would still be at least three months.
• SEO Is Constantly Changing: While change is always good, for us marketers, it is not. Every time we think that we have understood what SEO is, it changes into a completely new thing, making us start from scratch. So, you always have to be on the lookout for the latest updates and changes.

What Are Paid Advertisements?

SEM is the Google ads campaign. These are the results that you can see over the organic results. A paid ad campaign is like you are bidding for the price you can pay per user. Although it is an effective and immediate method to get instant traffic, it is costly.

When using Paid Advertising, you only pay when a user clicks your ad and visits your website. These ads are generated with the help of information. The information helps you create a buyer’s persona and target the same.

You need to be aware that a paid ad solution doesn’t give you leverage over the organic results or improve your organic search rankings.

Pros

• Reach Directly To Your Target Audience: The cool feature of SEM are that you can customize the ads to target a particular type of audience. This gives the marketers freedom to reach customers that matches their buyer’s persona.
• SEM Are Measurable: If you cannot measure a metric, you will never know just how successful your plan, strategy, or campaign was. SEM campaigns are easily measurable and can be put together for a report. With that, you can easily determine the ROI generated by SEM.
• Instantly Boost Your Sales: The great thing about SEM is that it can instantly boost your sales and website traffic. This is because the ads are customized in such a way that they are shown to the most relevant audience. If you are already using SEO to get organic customers, running SEM from time to time can significantly boost your ROI.

Cons

• Clicks Don’t Mean Sales: You must understand that you get any sales just because you are running SEM. It is just a method of targeting the right person and redirecting it to your website. Now, it is up to you to convert those audiences into paying customers. So, try to create a user-friendly website and try to persuade them to convert.
• SEM Require Skills: Setting up an effective PPC campaign can be challenging. This is because most paid ad campaigns need comprehensive setups. This also includes a complicated process of adding new information at every step of setting up. This process is so complicated that businesses just hire a digital marketing professional.

Should You Invest In SEO Or SEM?

Now you know what SEO and SEM are capable of individually - Which works better or which is a better investment for your organization?

The answer depends on what your organization needs and wants to achieve - Because SEO and SEM intend to work in favor of the organization. The only difference is that they follow different approaches.

In a nutshell: SEO allows the organization to get found online by their audiences organically. Yes, the optimization might take a while, but all the patience really pays off.

On the other hand, SEM lets you reach your targeted audience more immediately and help your campaign bring traffic to your business.