SEO vs SEM Which is better for our business, SEO or Search Engine Marketing?, Everyone who works under the name of e-commerce, must encounter two important terms (search engine optimization and search engine marketing). And all marketers fall in front of which of these two terms is better for their work (SEO or SEM).
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Activities that you do on your website, such as maintaining a certain keyword density, or on other websites, such as building links, with the aim of getting higher on search engine results pages, are called search engine optimization (SEO).
Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Paying search engines to send qualified traffic to your website, perhaps using a pay-per-click mechanism, i.e. you pay Google or Bing through paid ads so your site appears on the SERP, this is Search Engine Marketing (SEM).
Search engine marketing goes deeper than we just described, and it actually involves a lot of SEO related practices.
Which is better for e-commerce companies?
The answer to this question does not include a specific answer in itself, as it depends on several things for each type, including:
- Reasons why SEO is better
- Spending gets one time from the resources while reaping benefits forever.
- Achieving success from SEO is a huge advantage, But it is not easy for us to repeat it in a short time. Even if we achieve the desired success, it is considered a competitive advantage.
- Putting a little effort into the SEO process for your e-commerce sites pays off big. Although by nature it is somewhat weak, the effort that is made has an effect.
- Most search engine users prefer to get more credible organic results through ads.
- The cost per visitor, in the long run, is expected to be a small part of what you will ultimately pay for your search engine marketing campaigns.
- In some sectors, spending on search engine marketing has turned out to be prohibitive.
Reasons Why Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is Better
- What distinguishes search engine marketing campaigns is the speed in getting results, while search engine optimization can sometimes require months.
- In search engine marketing, you can know what you are paying for, and this helps you measure your return on investment (RoI).
- Your spending on search engine marketing will suddenly not be worth zero when search engines like Google tweak their algorithm.
- Once you hit the winning formula, you can continue to scale your search engine marketing strategy very easily.
- Most e-commerce companies notice, on a per-visitor basis, that PPC traffic converts better than organic search traffic.
- You control how your brand name and other attributes are treated.
Is SEO or SEM better
The pros and cons that the above lists highlight are compelling. It is clear that e-commerce companies cannot completely overlook SEO or search engine marketing. Here are some conclusions you can draw:
- If our e-commerce site is new, then we can't wait for SEO to succeed. So, therefore, you are asking us to spend most of our resources, say 90%, on search engine marketing exercises, and the remaining 10% on SEO.
- As time progresses, and you find some success in SEO, you can gradually increase the allocation of resources to SEO.
- At the moment there will be something that you want to promote continuously and permanently, so it requires you to rely on the paid visits that we mentioned in search engine marketing. In the long run, you can get stability when you spend 50-50 on SEO and search engine marketing activities.
Conclusion
Search Engine Marketing is very easy to dive deep into your business without resorting to SEO, but with time your CPC may rise to a level that your business may not be able to cover. So it's better if you build so-called organic traffic via SEOs. You can also use content marketing as a search engine optimization approach.