4 Things you Should Know About SEM versus SEO

 

Most people don’t seem to understand the difference between SEM and SEO. For a start, the acronyms refer to Search Engine Marketing and Search Engine Optimization. SEO is actually part of SEM. However, SEM contains many elements than SEO. In fact, they are the most effective methods of internet marketing. Both of them have one objective in common; increase the presence of a business on the internet. The two strategies are very cheap when compared with other methods of marketing. Below is a compilation of the stuff that you need to know about SEM and SEO.

 

1. SEM is Not Free

This is actually the major difference between SEO and SEM. Once you have decided to use SEM, you must be ready to part away with your money. This is because SEM requires you to pay for the campaigns. The good thing is that you can create a budget that doesn’t strain your pockets. The other benefit is that SEM guarantees that your brand will be seen by thousands of people. And maybe that’s why the search engines only debit you for leads that have already been generated. This means that you will not pay even a single cent if your campaigns don’t bring traffic to your website. SEO on the other hand is free. This is because it relies on organic searches. All you have to do is find highly valued keywords and add them into the content of your website. But this doesn’t mean that you have to fill your content with keywords. If you do that, your website will not appear anywhere in the first pages of search results.

 

2. SEO is Slow

When you use SEO to boost the visibility of your website, you need to have the patience of a saint. This is because it takes days, weeks and sometimes months for your effort to bear any results. Besides that, there are so many businesses that compete for the same keywords. If you want to earn more visitors through SEO, you must use the keywords with the lowest competition. SEM on the other hand is very fast in generating traffic. This is because the ads appear at the top of search engine results. If you use email ads, everyone that has an email address will see your brand when they are reading emails.

 

3. SEM has More Features

With SEO, you can only tell how often a keyword is used in a given geographic area. After including keywords into your content, there is not much you can do except keeping your fingers crossed. SEM is very rich in features. For a start, there is a feature for selecting the time and location for displaying your ads. And there is more. It’s also possible to select the age of your leads and the amount of money that should not be exceeded within a day, week or month.

 

4. SEM Return on Investment is Measurable

SEO doesn’t give you the privilege of measuring your ROI. In fact, you can only gauge the performance of your SEO strategies using analytic tools that are available in your website. And even that doesn’t guarantee that you will get a comprehensive report. With SEM you can literally get an exclusive report that’s broken down into average Google Ads CTR, or click through rate, the browsers used, operating system, devices used and location of the leads earned.