Search Engine Optimization(SEO) and Search Engine Marketing(SEM) are synergistic marketing strategies that work best together. While they are different, they both play very similar roles sharing one common goal… to bring website users to your site. The goal of SEO is to attract users organically – without paying for each click. With SEM or PPC(Pay Per Click), online marketers are using a variety of techniques to proactively market the website and are willing to pay for clicks.
Why You Need Both
SEO takes up to 6 months to get traction. SEM can be up and running in a day providing immediate visitors to your site.
Search Engines, especially Google, will periodically adjust their algorithms of how they rank sites which may temporarily hurt the performance of your SEO campaign. SEM will be constant.
Some keywords for your business may be very competitive. Getting a good ranking with SEO may be difficult but you can always get placement with SEM.
On the other hand, expensive keywords as well as high volume keywords, may be best handled in SEO to extend your budget.
You may not have sufficient budget to run SEM 24/7. SEO will be there when your paid ads are not. SEO does not stop the moment your budget does.
SEO provides targeted keywords and ready-made market research information for SEM, which assists in the creation of more effective and targeted advertisements. The reverse can often be true as well. By determining which PPC ads result in the most conversions, you’ll have a good idea how to create title tags, meta descriptions and page content for the pages that you want to rank organically.
SEO bases a lot of its success on making sure the content on the website reflects what a person is searching for. When SEO is effective at improving content this will improve the Quality Score for SEM, and reduce the cost of an SEM click.
The goal of both SEO and SEM is for high placement on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page). Paid and organic listings work together on the SERP. In a recent study by Nielsen Research, the importance of coordinating paid and organic SEM campaigns was demonstrated. When a brand name appeared in both organic and paid search results, the brand attracted 92% more clicks than if only one of the two listings was present.
A colleague of mine likes to say, “a rising tide raises all ships” and it is clear that SEO and SEM together help to raise the traffic for any website.
