Once you become familiar with search engine optimization and have learned some of the abbreviations included in the topic, it is easy to start thinking about what really differs between SEO and SEM. You may also be thinking about what you should choose; What are the pros and cons of the various methods of getting traffic from search engines? Let me tell you.
This is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
According to AbbreviationFinder, SEO is used to improve and optimize your site to make it appear in the search results of e.g. Google, as close to the top as possible on keywords that are linked to what you are selling. You do this in several ways:
- You optimize your page by Google’s standards by, for example, adding titles and meta descriptions to your site’s subpages that contain your most important keywords and clearly showing what the site is about.
- You make sure to have good and search-friendly text on the site. A search-friendly text contains good and relevant information and contains your chosen keywords for the site or sub-page.
- You can also hunt for links on other sites to your site. A good linking strategy is one of the most important components of SEO. It is through the link strategy that you obtain inbound and outbound links and good links give you a good position at Google. In the next article, which will be published after the summer, I will explain a little more detail about what is part of a good link strategy.
The key word in SEO is to “speed up slowly”: you set up a long-term plan and cannot expect results in the first few months.
Benefits of SEO
- Easy to make many changes yourself
- Clear guidelines from Google to follow
- Relatively cheap if you do a lot yourself
- You will get deep knowledge of your own site in the meantime
- You can get long-term results
Disadvantages of SEO
- Requires a lot of time
- Costs if you don’t want to do it yourself
- Difficult to fix a link strategy yourself
- Google is changing rapidly, so it may be difficult to follow their guidelines
- Can take up to a year to see results for the meeting
This is Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
You use SEM when you want to market your site through the search engines to drive traffic to it. With SEM, your site and its content are displayed in sponsored boxes around the search results. You have purchased the ad space and the cost of this varies depending on which keywords you want to appear on. For unusual keywords, the cost can be as low as a few pennies: popular keywords can instead cost up to $ 50, sometimes even more. The most common payment method is that you have to pay when someone clicks on the link to your site.
Often they talk about Adwords in conjunction with SEM which is Google’s own service for creating paid marketing on a search engine.
Benefits of SEM
- Easy to read results of your investment with the help of Analytics and Google’s other software linked to SEM.
- Increased traffic to the site. You can quickly get more visitors by appearing more and sometimes you hardly have to pay anything (it all depends on how much competition is for the keyword).
- Opportunity for increased sales. With increased traffic you can get more shopping!
- Google likes Adwords.
Disadvantages of SEM
- Costs more than eg search engine optimization.
- Longer learning; difficult to manage yourself.
- You are not visible in the organic search results.
- As soon as you stop paying you will no longer be visible.
For those of you who have a site you want to develop or increase the potential of, I recommend (and certainly many others) that you use both SEO and SEM to get the best results. SEM can deliver fast results and increase the visibility of your site, while SEO can create a safe and long-term development that will give you good results in the long run.
