SEO vs SEM – Which is Right for Your Business?
With the ever increasing competition among businesses in both on a local and on the global scale, setting up a website for your brand has now become more of an essential requirement than an optional one. It should serve as a virtual place where you can showcase your products and services and also receive feedback and interact with your clients. Creating your own website, however, is not enough to help you boost web traffic and consequently the volume of sales. You should also invest your time and money on increasing your page ranking on top search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
On average, the first three websites on a results page receive 47% or almost half of the number of clicks for a given search. This is what you should be aiming for to be able to reach your targeted audience and promote your brand. Search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) are two of the most popular strategies to help you increase your pages’ ranking and to gain more visibility and searchability online.
Learn more about SEO and SEM and know which one is the better option for your business.
Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization refers to the set of techniques that you can use to help your website achieve a higher ranking on search engine result pages or SERPs without spending even a single dime. SEO focuses on the content and user experience more than any other factors. SEO also has two main types: on-site and off-site search engine optimization.
As its name suggests, on-site SEO refers to the optimization of content present on your website. It includes choosing interesting topics and targeted keywords for your articles. SEO also involves posting content that is factual, relevant, and easy to understand, integrating images and videos, optimizing the URLs, simplifying the layout of the pages, achieving an SEO-friendly website design, and many more.
Off-site SEO involves increasing traffic on your pages through the use of links coming from other websites. This strategy of partnering with other websites to generate more traffic is called link building.
Although using SEO does not incur any direct costs, you may need to invest time and money to get the best results from your digital marketing campaign.
Search Engine Marketing
On the other ise, search engine marketing makes use of pay per click advertising or PPC to place your webpage on top of an SERP. One of the most popular SEM tools is Google Adwords, wherein users can bid on a set of keywords to place their clickable ads on top of a results page.
What should you choose for your business?
Many business owners are torn between using SEO or SEM for their digital marketing campaign. While many small businesses can benefit from SEO, it requires more marketing effort and patience to start working. SEM, meanwhile, provides fast and clear results by boosting web traffic. The downside is that it comes at a price.
In reality, choosing the best strategy depends on the needs of your business and what you are willing to invest. Go try both of these digital marketing techniques and see which one delivers the best results for your business.
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