What Is the Best Marketing Strategy on the Internet – SEO Or SEM?

The term SEO is used for ‘Search Engine Optimization’ and SEM is used for ‘Search Engine Marketing’. Both of these are obviously related to the search engines, and deal with enhancing a website’s visibility on the Internet and getting web traffic. So what is the difference between SEO and SEM, and which one of them is better?

SEO, SEM and the Difference Between the Two

As mentioned above, SEO stands for search engine optimization wherein the optimizer will try to enhance the website’s visibility so that it can come up in the organic listings for popular keywords. The SEO professional will implement both ‘on-page’ and ‘off-page’ techniques to achieve the results. When the website ranks well for popular keywords, it receives a lot of traffic, and every online business person will agree that good Internet traffic is the basic requirement for success.

However the problem is, if your website is in an extremely competitive niche such as travel, pet care, money making, health care products and others like this, it might be extremely difficult to get top ranks for popular keywords. There are after all just 10 websites that can get ranked on page 1, and hundreds of websites are trying to achieve these positions. Search engine results also go up and down a lot. For example, with a lot of hard work you might have achieved great results, but when there is just a little change in the algorithm (referred to as “Google dance” when this happens at Google), all or most of your ranks can go off. And when this happens, your entire traffic goes too.

SEO is thus uncertain. SEO can also take a lot of time. So are you willing to wait for a long time for that traffic? Can your online business afford to wait for 6 months or perhaps a full year? Most businesses cannot.

This is where SEM comes in. SEM or search engine marketing is a broader term, and SEO is just one aspect of this. In other words, when you are doing search engine marketing, you are exploring all possible avenues of generating web traffic, and not just depending on your ranks. This is why there are many webmasters and Internet marketers who would recommend SEM, while you wait for your SEO results to pick up.

SEM Includes the Following

• PPC or Pay Per Click campaigns
• Affiliate marketing
• Article marketing
• Email marketing
• Banner advertisements or display marketing
• Social media marketing
• Blog marketing

The best marketing strategy is a combination of all or many of these. And if you or your marketing person has done a good job, then you can expect good traffic from these sources.

PPC can give you the best results because you begin to generate traffic almost immediately as you set up the campaign and run your advertisements, but it can be costly. Remember, you have to pay for each click, and if your landing page is not converting, you could end up leaking money. So you can start off with PPC, and while your campaign gets you traffic, concentrate on SEO. With time and effort, your SEO ranks will come up and get you organic free traffic. When this happens you can reduce your PPC budget gradually.

SEO gives you free traffic and is thus cost effective. SEM can give you guaranteed traffic.