What Is SEO & SEM? How Is It Useful For Business?
Waleed Al Toukhi
Marketing & Brand Communication – Saudi Arabia | Marketing Communications
You cannot expect your business to go anywhere if you are stuck with the traditional ways in today's world. Every company had to make an online presence to move forward. But have you ever thought that if all businesses are successfully contributing to an online presence, why only a few succeed? This is because most of them are caught up believing that having a website and a social media handle that receives posts once in a while is enough. These businesses often get outrun by the competitors who give enough emphasis to SEO and SEM. If you are not familiar with these terms, let's move further and discuss them in detail.
Meaning Of SEM
Search engine marketing or SEM, as the name suggests, involves all the paid tactics used to promote your website on search engines, specifically paid ads. Every time you search for something on a search engine, you come across advertisements on the SERPs. These are the paid ads by different companies in the niche you searched. Most businesses experience many benefits through this form of marketing since search engines specifically target the right people. This means that the people who are willing to purchase your product or avail of your services will come across your ads.
Why Is SEM Important For Your Business?
Paid ads can be a great way of promoting your business without much hassle. The reason behind the popularity of SEM is the quality leads it generates.
What can be better than your product being promoted in front of people who are actually looking forward to it? Reaching out to your target audience becomes much easier. You will realize that paid ads are less costly once you see the profit it leads to.
The reason why you need to go for SEM is that paid ads appear before organic search results. Other than that, if you leave behind PPC, it could take you long enough to make some real progress. It is used by all types of businesses, no matter the size or industry.
If you are tired of coming across people who are hardly interested in your product or services, it's time to generate quality leads. Also, the top-most benefit of pay-per-click or PPC is that you pay only in case you people click on the link and visit your website.
Most businesses are worried about budget problems, but you can easily limit the time of your ads. If you are clearly aware of the time when your target audience is active, you can choose to display your ads during that time only. This ensures you make the most out of your investment.
Meaning Of SEO
Search engine optimization or SEO refers to all the tactics used to increase organic traffic to the website. It involves optimizing your content to be easily identified by search engines as well as your target audience. You can improve your reach drastically by focussing on including relevant keywords, providing in-depth content that provides value to your users, etc.
Websites spend a considerable amount of time understanding Google's algorithm to ensure they improve their ranking. Google no more gives emphasis to only keywords for ranking. Several factors need to be considered, including quality backlinks, explicit content, product images, meta tags, etc.
Why Is SEO Important For My Business?
Take some time out to analyze the two questions below:
How do you think your website will perform if your content appears on the eighth page of SERPs?
No one takes time out to go till the eighth page. It is of utmost importance to improve your ranking on SERPs to ensure people visit and go through your site. This can be done by working on several aspects while creating content for your website.
Firstly, focus on creating high-quality and in-depth content on trending topics that users are interested in. Secondly, ensure you add all the relevant keywords throughout the content to reach out to the people searching for you.
Next, improve your online presence by obtaining quality backlinks from websites through guest blogging. People often ignore the importance of guest blogging, but this is the most convenient way of increasing traffic on your site.
SEO And SEM: Is There Any Difference?
Most people get confused between the two terms, but they are entirely different. SEM involves paying a particular amount to Google for promoting your business. On the other hand, SEO consists of increasing organic traffic by providing the most relevant content to users.
SEO and SEM marketing are collectively used to improve the overall position of a website on search engines.
Why Do I Need To Use These Marketing Tactics?
How do you expect your business to grow if it is not visible to your target audience? The chances of conversion increase once you observe a sufficient amount of traffic on your site. Most businesses find it extremely difficult to generate leads. But by a proper combination of both of these tactics, you can successfully come across people who will eventually turn into customers.
As observed above, SEM could be more costly than SEO since the latter involves changes that could be made without spending much money. This is why you can choose what works best for you based on your budget.
But remember that SEM is nothing without SEO since paid ads can give you visitors, but the quality of content they see once they visit your website decides whether they will turn into a customer. Try to focus equally on both of them to quickly generate visitors on your site that convert into regular customers. The whole point is to make it easy for them to come across your website, analyze it, and see if it's their best choice or not.