Search Engine Marketing and Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) are two key tools contributing to a site’s online success. You can decide to use one without the other; however, it will take you much longer to get to your desired goal. Find out why you should consider using them in tandem.

What is Search Engine Marketing strategy?

Before you dive into why SEM & SEO should be used together; let’s break down their definitions to understand them better. Search engine marketing refers to techniques used by companies to build an online presence for their product or service offering.

SEM and SEO Broken Down

SEO: This is the practice of increasing search engine rankings by using organic and unpaid tactics.

PPC (Pay-per-click aka Paid advertising): This is placing directories in search engines through funded advertisements.

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Why is Search Engine Marketing important?

Millions of people across the globe browse the internet to search for anything and everything under the sun. This can be a new restaurant, solving a problem etc. This is where search marketing comes in. Businesses can develop strategies to draw in more customers and increase their sales.

Companies across the globe use a variety of tactics to generate more traffic to their pages from search engine results pages (SERPS). In a nutshell, SEMs purpose is to promote site visibility using organic search and paid search ranking. Contextual advertising can be included in this mix too.

According to Craig Dunham, CEO of SEO platform Deep Crawl, “There are roughly three and a half billion Google searches every day.” Also, research from MarTech stated that 84% of people browse Google at least three times a day. This reiterates Craig’s point. Consumers will always begin their search using a search tool such as Google or Bing. This is where the revenue begins.

Organic Search Engine Optimization

It can take time to rank because organic search engine traffic has been found to be the best B2B and B2C leads. So, we need to know your audience and market. We already do this by constantly optimizing our websites.

Publishing and Promoting Content

Constantly developing relevant content will result in the quality of traffic to your website. This can help place your site/ work among the top thought leaders in your niche/industry.

Social Media

Social Networks can help achieve short-term and long-term marketing strategies. These can range from managing engagement with your audience (finding out what they like & dislike) to promoting web content and lead generation activities.

Why Should SEO and SEM work together?

If you haven’t considered setting aside a budget for SEM, you should. Most businesses use both organic and paid SEO. Studies have shown an average of 25% more clicks and 27% more profit when combined. SEO strategies are usually compatible with SEM.

So, there you have it. When you use them together, you increase your visibility and click-through rates. This can also help you set better shared metric results such as Return of Investment (RoI) and user engagement. The data collected gives you a broader perspective on whether your campaigns’ actions are justifiable.

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