Why should new businesses combine SEO and SEM for a power combo?

With the increase of Internet users each day, digital sale; digital marketing and content strategy is always very important which is an essential part of any success campaign for businesses around the world. SEO and SEM take a major responsibility to help businesses to reach their target audience and also increase their consumer base. According to Internet Live Stats, there are more than 85,000 searches per second each day on Google globally (Internet Live Stats, 2020). Moreover, in August 2020, Google takes the major search traffic globally which is 70.43% and the left over is spreading out for Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, etc. (Net Market Share, 200). These two factors again show the importance of SEO and SEM to businesses.

So what is SEO AND SEM?

SEO is search engine optimization which gets free traffic from search engines including on page SEO, technical SEO and off-page SEO (Hardwick, 2020). It is the process of improving a company's sites in a way that helps it rank in search results by specific keywords and phrases. SEO refers to inbound marketing which

helps marketers to target quality traffic which consumers can find the company when they need or want to find out the information online.

SEM is search engine marketing, it is an encompass of SEO and pay per click (PPC) which refer to paid search advertising and normally appear on top of search pages included on Google where content using selective keywords (Digital Marketing Institute, 2020). With SEM, marketers can be applying KPIs which include cost through rate or cost per click within an allotted budget, these characteristics give marketers a lot of flexibility when using SEM as part of their campaign.

Why should they combine together?

Attention, website traffic, communication, visibility and effectiveness are those key factors that all marketers want to achieve for a successful online campaign. And to have those outcomes, marketers should implement both SEO and SEM in their marketing strategy to achieve their highest goals for the campaign or products that they want to advertise, here are three reasons why marketers should combine them.

Firstly, when consumers are actively looking for any related information related to your products or brands, you should push as much as you can which apply both SEM and SEO to help attract more users which would help to be more effective in reaching businesses target audience. Research found that 71.33% of searches result in a click on an organic result on the first page and the left over is for those that are happy to click through SEM (Zero Limit Web Digital Marketing, 2020). So marketers should grab all of those traffics when using SEO for a long term basis for company sites and SEM to attract the additional traffic that has been missed from SEO.

Secondly, with the nature of SEO, it does take a lot of time and effort to see result to become #1 ranking (Brown, 2018), so to help business can make sale and growth, while putting a growth mode on SEO, marketer can also be putting money into SEM to get company ads out there as they can immediately appear on page 1 position, it would help drive traffic and therefore more people would know while businesses manage their SEO into top ranks.

Lastly, while SEO doesn't give marketers as much level of control (Brown, 2018), SEM gives businesses that specialty when companies pay to display an ad which easier to show out the strategy to consumers plus tailored their ads. Marketers can also be flexible to start and end their campaign or strategy, they only need to pay when consumers click on their ad.

In conclusion SEO and SEM is not a competitor but it can be a good combination especially for new companies that need to raise a lot of awareness and so they can attract more consumers (Shastry, 2013). They are good to combine together as discussed above that can bring more traffic, time efficiency and flexibility which can end up bringing attention, website traffics, communication, visibility and effectiveness for a campaign that company put out there.

Reference:

Brown, S. (2018). How To Combine SEO & SEM For Better Results. Retrieved from https://launchexperts.co/blog/combine-seo-sem-better-results/

Digital Marketing Institute. (2020). SEO vs SEM: How Do They Work Together. Retrieved 2020, from https://digitalmarketinginstitute.com/blog/how-do-seo-and-sem-work-together-in-2018

Hardwick, J. (2020, April). SEO vs. SEM: What’s the Difference and Why Should You Care? Retrieved from https://ahrefs.com/blog/seo-vs-sem/

Internet Live Stats. (2020). internet live stats. Retrieved from https://www.internetlivestats.com/one-second/#google-band

Net Market Share. (2020). Search Engine Market Share. Retrieved 2020, from https://www.netmarketshare.com/search-engine-market-share.aspx?options=%7B%22filter%22%3A%7B%22%24and%22%3A%5B%7B%22deviceType%22%3A%7B%22%24in%22%3A%5B%22Desktop%2Flaptop%22%5D%7D%7D%5D%7D%2C%22dateLabel%22%3A%22Trend%22%2C%22attributes%22%3A%22share%22%2C%22group%22%3A%22searchEngine%22%2C%22sort%22%3A%7B%22share%22%3A-1%7D%2C%22id%22%3A%22searchEnginesDesktop%22%2C%22dateInterval%22%3A%22Monthly%22%2C%22dateStart%22%3A%222019-09%22%2C%22dateEnd%22%3A%222020-08%22%2C%22segments%22%3A%22-1000%22%7D

Shastry, K. (2013, August 07). SEO? SEM? Why Not Both?! Retrieved from https://landerapp.com/blog/seo-sem-why-not-both/

Zero Limit Web Digital Marketing. (2020). Organic SEO vs PPC. Retrieved 2020, from https://www.zerolimitweb.com/organic-vs-ppc-2020-ctr-results-best-practices/