SEO and SEM are essentials in online marketing strategies, but they are also two abbreviations that lead to confusion. Which is better for my brand and how can I use them to empower each other?
It's time to clear all your doubts about this topic.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It can be defined as "the process of improving the visibility of a website in the organic results of different search engines." Often, SEO strategies focus on Google, since it is the search engine used by the vast majority of users.
Within this definition, it is very important to emphasize that SEO refers to organic results. Organic results mean, that we are not going to pay the search engine company for our page results to position better.
Search engines have evolved over the years and with them SEO strategies have become increasingly sophisticated. In a simple way, there are two fundamental factors that influence the positioning of a web page:
SEM on the other hand, stands for Search Engine Marketing (search engine marketing). Globally, we could consider that SEM encompasses all the techniques used to improve the positioning of a website (including SEO). However, most marketers use SEM as a synonym for "search engine advertising". To avoid confusion, we will do the same in this article.
SEM, therefore, refers to the techniques that improve the positioning of our website through paid ads that appear in the search engines for certain keywords. Given the prominence of Google as a search engine, a common search advertising solution is Google Ads.
As we have seen, both SEO and SEM seek to improve the positioning of a website in search engines, such as Google. But there are several differences between them:
The next question is what is better, using SEO or SEM? The answer is both at the same time. It’s best to combine them and take advantage of their potential to achieve better results in both strategies.
Our philosophy in Cyberclick to combine SEM and SEO is summarized in a simple way: SEM first, SEO later:
But of course, all this work we've done is reusable for SEO. We already know which keywords are most interesting to us. The next step is to use this information to plan our content strategy, and to work our web, blog, and social networks around these keywords. It's not about including them in the texts without rhyme or reason. It's about trying to understand what users are looking for and how we can respond to their needs with quality content, all while reinforcing the link building strategy. And so, in the medium and long term, we can see the fruits of our effort in the organic positioning in Google.
