As a webmaster, your ultimate goal is to make sure that someone actually sees your website. Otherwise, you might have the best designed site – which happens to be a goldmine of information and offers top of the line products at rock-bottom prices – but you will still be the only person aware of its existence.
For every piece of information or product that you offer, there are hundreds, if not thousands of other sites that do the same exact thing. Unless you find a way to make your site stand out, you will never be able to elbow past them and stand in the forefront of where you will need to be to even consider being a competitor. But with the help of two little abbreviations, SEO and SEM, your David of a site might just tower over the Goliaths and the huge chunk of the web traffic rushing to them.
SEO stands for “search engine optimization”. Now, whenever you type words into your favorite search engine, the company behind the engine tries to match your words with the content of sites that they have cached on their servers and serve them to you in the order of how close they are to what you are looking for.
If you are a webmaster, you would make sure that the words that people are looking for are included in the content of your site so that your site is visible to the search companies. The ones that closely match the keywords are “ranked” higher up and appear at the top of the SERPs (search engine results pages) and are more visible to visitors.
Those words are called “keywords” and making sure that your website content is tightly built around those keywords is what SEO is all about.
SEM stands for “search engine marketing”. In this case you pay the popular search engines to send “qualified” traffic to your website. By qualified, it is meant that you pay for the keywords that you want your site to be “famous” for. When a person types in the keywords that are indicative of the goods or services that you are offering, you ask the search engines (by paying) to send them your way.
One of the most popular ways of doing this is by using a pay-per-click advertisement or “ad”. Your ad will appear on the top or side of the SERPs in the hope that searchers see and then click on it to ultimately end up on your page.
Now, a question many webmasters ask is “Should I use SEO or SEM for my website?”
The wisest answer would probably be a simple “Both!” – There is no harm in using SEO and SEM on your site. They both serve the sole purpose of bringing your site up to where your visitors, and potential clients, can see it.
But, if you are going to be insistent about having a choice made for you, read on.
Let us compare both methods:
1. The Price: The internet is full of information about how to implement an SEO campaign – in other words, it’s free. If you are diligent about it, you can read up on SEO strategies, find your keyword(s), and use what you have learnt about using the keyword(s) to create relevant content. All that is left is to publish the said content on your site.
With SEM, no one is going to give you ad space for free. You are going to have to pay if you want searchers to see your ads. The price that is set for each visitor’s click can be expensive – anywhere from cents to tens of dollars – depending on the popularity of your keyword(s) of choice. This makes it necessary for you, the webmaster, to make sure that every single person that comes to your site leaves with a purchase, making you a tidy profit. Otherwise people will be coming and going and all you’ll be doing is losing money fast.
2. The Time: SEO takes time. Your site will start climbing up the SERPs slowly. Over time, as more people discover and land on your page, the search engines will start to improve your rank. It could take a couple of months to even see your website climb up a single SERP. With SEM, it is a different story. Once you have paid your dues, the search engines will place your ads up on relative SERPs in a matter of hours. You can get people coming to your site right from the moment your ad has gone live.
3. Relative Ease: When talking about ease, we are assuming that you have already found the keywords that you want your site to rank for, since keyword research is in a topic of its own.
In terms of SEO, keywords are just the beginning of your labor. You will have to build content around those keywords. You will need to make sure that your site has enough of those keywords on it to push your site up the ranking ladder, while taking extreme care you are not kicked off the reservation by being penalized for keyword “stuffing” – the act of just putting the words there and having nothing relevant to go with them. Search engines today are very smart and sensitive about stuffing that once you get on their wrong side, it could be difficult to earn their trust back.
On the other hand, in SEM, all you have to do with the keyword(s) is hand them over to the search engines. They will do the matching with the relevant searches. The more you pay, the more often your ad will be displayed. If you have deep pockets, then you have a good chance of getting more traffic. It’s as simple as that.
Now that we have made these points, let’s see which one is better:
If you are an individual (that only offers information or free entertainment) or a small business just starting out, you would probably be better off with implementing an SEO campaign. You can slowly build your content, create the trust and move up the ladder. Once you reach the top, it is very rare that you fall back down. Search engines love sites that are consistent, popular with visitors and keep adding fresh content on a regular basis. The time invested in SEO is almost always worth it.
On the other hand, if you’re running a corporate website or one that is involved with ecommerce, you probably would have set aside a budget for the sole purpose of attracting visitors. You will want to see immediate results. All you will need to worry about is your return on investment (ROI). You will need to make sure that for every cent you spend on your ad, a purchase is made that will cover it when visitors arrive on your page. Therefore, SEM is the way to go. But, as mentioned earlier, this doesn’t mean that you should just stick with one. If you have the time and the money, you should go all out and implement both methods.
