SEM vs. SEO: A new focus for 2018?

Both are effective methods to try and increase awareness and traffic towards your site. Whether you are a start-up or established business, ensuring you fully understand the difference between SEO and SEM is important for long lasting success. Its beneficial to consider using both in your Marketing strategy, as a powerful way to grow and succeed as an online business.

Start your journey to online growth with a mix of SEO and SEM. Read more to learn more about how you can help your online business grow.

The Basics

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

This is using paid advertisements and page optimisation that appear within search results such as google pages. SEM may sometimes incorporate the use of SEO to achieve higher ranking through paid advertising methods. SEM can also include using Pay Per Click (PPC) and Social Media Marketing (SMM) to drive traffic and improve lead generation.

Ways to improve SEM:

• Keyword research and analysis
• Backlinks
• Paid advertising
• Paid social media advertising
• Modify and personalise adverts regularly

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

SEO is the process of and methods used when trying to improve rankings and traffic towards your site and trying to make your site appear higher within rank.

SEO can assist in the improvement of content and as a result improve user experience and usability. Optimising your site can help assist it appearing higher in Search Engine Results Pages (SERP), and therefore be seen by more users searching for your content. Users are more likely to trust higher ranking sites, so keeping on top of SEO can potentially increase sales and customers.

SEO includes improving listings by focusing on the quality of content on a site to rank it higher organically.

Ways to improve SEO:

• Improving page content.
• Using most searched and relevant keywords.
• Improving meta data and descriptions.
• Interlinking within site and pages.
• Offsite blog.

Combining SEO and SEM

The combination of using SEM and SEO is that, can help drive traffic towards your site.

When used alone, SEO can take time. This is as search engines, like Google, need to be able to crawl the site and then populate results in relation to customer queries. However, by introducing SEM to your SEO strategy, you can start driving relevant traffic to your site in the short term, bridging the gap and time it takes for your SEO work to take effect. As a result, this can help maximise profit and bring in audience in the meantime and create additional opportunities.

Both SEM and SEO can be cost-effective solutions to generate long-term traffic towards your site. As months go on and traffic increases, you can evaluate results to improve long-term results.

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