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SEO vs SEM: Why You Actually Need Both!

Marketing Trends October 31, 2024

Avatar of Ivan Velazquez

Writen by Ivan Velazquez

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KnewChoice founder exploring SEO vs SEM and why you need both

Introduction

If I had to pick the two most misunderstood topics in digital marketing, I would have to choose SEM (Search Engine Optimization) and SEO (Search Engine Marketing). Try searching the phrase SEO vs SEM, and you will find several articles from reputable brands and marketers explaining the difference between the two and why you need one over the other.

Only some articles, however, will detail why you need both. The debate about which traffic source is better depends on each brand or marketer’s expertise and the service they offer. A PPC expert will tell you that SEM is better. An SEO expert, on the other hand, will tell you that SEO is the way to go. 

KnewChoice, however, is one of the few agencies that actively promotes the use of both strategies to achieve great long-term growth that is more predictable. For this month’s blog, we will explore SEO vs SEM and why you should actively leverage both, not just one or the other.

KnewChoice founder exploring SEO vs SEM and why you need both

What is SEO?

It’s safe to assume that most people are familiar with SEO because it’s one of the most talked about digital strategies. You can find articles and videos about SEO strategies, from mom bloggers to well-established digital marketers – each offering their own opinions and expertise.

The Challenges of Sticking with an SEO Strategy

The interesting part about SEO is that despite thousands of articles and videos about this topic, people still over-complicate the process or choose to ignore their SEO strategy after only a few weeks. The biggest challenge with SEO and building an effective SEO strategy is that it can take a long time to take effect. SEO is a long-term investment, but we live in the age of instant gratification, so SEO is quickly abandoned for something quick and easy. 

The instant gratification mentality is one reason there are so many digital marketing gurus, each peddling their get-rich-quick schemes. It’s easier to focus on the right now vs. slow and steady growth, which can take weeks or months to achieve.  

Now that we have that out of the way. Let’s pretend you know nothing about SEO or what it entails. 

So, what is SEO? SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, refers to strategies that improve a website’s ranking on search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, and YouTube (yes, YouTube is owned by Google, but it requires a slightly different approach). It encompasses a variety of techniques, including on-page and off-page tactics, to make a site more attractive to search engines and users.

How Keywords Impact SEO

How do you make a site more engaging for users? You rely on keywords and topics related to the keywords that help people find information and solve a problem. However, there is a fine line between strategically using keywords to rank for content and overusing keywords that can penalize your content because you engaged in “keyword stuffing,” which is a no-no in Google’s eyes. 

To improve your website’s content ranking, you need to use relevant keywords, and the content needs to entertain, educate, or both. In March of 2024, Google introduced a new algorithm that decimated traffic across dozens of websites because the content was generic and didn’t offer value. 

Likewise, many businesses cranking out ChatGPT or AI-generated content learned that Google is pretty good at determining what content is written by a person vs. AI. Most of these blogs and web pages were heavily impacted as a result.  

Now, let’s dive a little deeper and explore the three major components of SEO. 

Primary Components of SEO:

  • On-Page SEO: Focuses on optimizing individual web pages, including keywords, meta descriptions, page titles, headers, content, and image descriptions.
  • Off-Page SEO: Involves actions outside the website, such as link building, social media engagement, guest blogging, or public speaking to boost site authority.
  • Technical SEO: Ensures the website is structured so search engines can efficiently crawl, index, and rank the content across search engines. It also includes fixing navigational and functional elements that impact the user experience and your SEO scores. 

As you can see, SEO has only three parts. Yes, there are dozens of strategies within each part, but focusing on just the three items above will achieve greater success.

Now, let’s review the benefits of SEO.

Benefits of SEO:

  • Long-term Traffic Generation: When done right, SEO strategies create a sustained flow of organic traffic as long as you follow Google’s SEO updates and focus on creating meaningful content that solves a problem or answers a question.  
  • Cost-Effectiveness: Compared to SEM, SEO has a lower cost over time, making it budget-friendly for new businesses and startups.  
  • Building Organic Visibility: SEO strategies build credibility and help establish authority within a niche.

If you noticed, I briefly discussed some SEO strategies in the primary components of SEO above, but let’s examine some strategies in more detail.

Common SEO Strategies:

  • Keyword Research: This strategy involves using keyword research tools like Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, Spyfu, Ahrefs, and others to identify relevant keywords that match user intent and the topic or industry you wish to target. 
  • Content Optimization: Once you complete your keyword research, you will want to write new content or optimize existing content that provides value and aligns with the keywords you identified.
  • Link Building: Link building is among the most essential yet difficult SEO strategies. It requires extensive networking and outreach to other websites and bloggers to convince them to provide a link back to your website or content. Earning links from authoritative sites can boost page authority and generate free long-term traffic, resulting in qualified sales or leads.

Technical Improvements: Technical SEO involves fixing or optimizing page loading speeds, improving website functionality across mobile and desktop browsers, removing broken pages or images, and ensuring navigational components work as intended. Few people know that having a poorly functioning website affects the user experience that Google considers when awarding you free traffic. You can offer the best services or products in the world, but if your website functions poorly, Google will penalize you and push it to the back of the internet, where no one will find it.

What is SEM?

While most people are familiar with SEO, only some are familiar with SEM. The reason has to do with technical execution and having the financial resources to launch an SEM campaign. 

If you recall, I mentioned that most people are familiar with SEO because it doesn’t require an upfront investment. You can use free keyword research tools or Google Search to identify keywords you want to target and then start writing blogs or creating content with those keywords. 

With SEO, you’re investing “sweat equity.” With SEM, you invest actual equity and need results to recoup your money.

Understanding the Basics of SEM

Before we get ahead of ourselves, you’re probably wondering, what is SEM? SEM, or Search Engine Marketing, sometimes called Search Engine Monetization, goes beyond organic tactics by utilizing paid ads to appear on search engine results pages or social media platforms. 

The most common SEM strategy is PPC (Pay-Per-Click) advertising, in which businesses bid for ad placements to capture high-intent users on search engines.

SEM and Social Media Advertising

Social Media advertising, aka Paid Social Media advertising, now falls into this category because rather than creating organic content, you run ads across social platforms to promote your products or services. 

Depending on your industry, running ads on Google and Microsoft ads (former Bing Ads) can be a very lucrative way of advertising your products and services across all properties owned by each search engine. 

Likewise, we often work with clients who balance SEM strategies on search engines and social media platforms to increase their reach. 

Businesses that sell physical products typically rely on Meta, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and X to sell their e-commerce products. Service-based companies often promote their services on LinkedIn, Meta, YouTube, and X to generate leads. Industry-specific platforms include G2, Capterra, Amazon, Quora, and Reddit.

The ROI Advantage of SEM

The beauty of SEM is that your top priority is revenue (at least that’s the case at KnewChoice). Unlike SEO, which can take time to understand your ROI, SEM allows you to see ROI sooner and determine if your campaigns are profitable or costing you money. 

Understanding the equitable components of SEO is more challenging because your efforts don’t easily translate into dollars. For example, you might be paying an agency to write content and perform technical or on-page SEO, but it can take weeks or months to improve traffic and sales. 

With e-commerce or lead generation campaigns across SEM platforms, you immediately know how much advertising costs and whether you’re making money. If you’re not making sales at the end of the month, you either need to optimize your campaigns or switch platforms that align with your business and services. 

Keep in mind, however, SEM is not a silver bullet. On average, it takes about three months to see significant results. While you may see results immediately, determining your revenue depends on your sales process and cycles. Businesses with expensive products or services requiring significant financial investments have longer sales cycles, which extend the time it takes to understand the correlation between how much you’re spending on advertising vs. how much money you’re making from your advertising. 

Now that you have all of the background info on SEM, let’s examine some of its benefits.

Benefits of SEM:

  • Immediate Visibility and Traffic: SEM ads can instantly place your brand in front of the right audience and target demographic.
  • Targeted Advertising: SEM allows marketers to segment audiences based on demographics, location, and even time of day.

Flexible Budgeting: With SEM, you control your spend, allowing for scalability based on campaign performance and how much traffic your business can afford.

Common SEM Strategies:

  • Paid Search Advertising: This strategy involves keyword research, just like SEO, but you bid on keywords relevant to your business. When someone searches for your products and services on search engines, your ads will display to people looking for products and services based on the keywords you’re targeting. The nice thing about PPC (pay-per-click) is that you only pay if someone clicks your ad. 
  • Paid Social Media: Similar to PPC, paid social media requires running ads across social platforms. The difference is that you often see image-based ads instead of text-based ads across Google and Microsoft search engines. The other key difference is that you pay per 1000 ad impressions based on the cost of advertising for that day and when someone clicks on your ad. 
  • Display Advertising: This strategy involves running image-based ads or videos (banner ads) across various websites within the Google and Microsoft display networks. Every banner ad you’ve seen on a website was because a business paid Google or Microsoft money to run an ad on their display network, which was later shown on your favorite website or blog. Think of the display network as the modern version of running ads in a magazine or newspaper. 
  • Remarketing, aka Retargeting: Anyone who has visited a website selling products is familiar with remarketing/retargeting. This strategy is also leveraged within Google or Microsoft ads, allowing businesses to track and target website visitors. A common approach is running a PPC campaign that entices someone to visit your website. If the visitor doesn’t purchase your products or services, you target those people when they visit other websites. 

Once you’ve explored SEO vs SEM, it’s easy to see how similar they are. Still, it’s important to understand their differences, which is why companies invest in one over the other.

SEO vs SEM: Key Differences

I have already addressed some of the similarities between SEO and SEM, and for this section, I am focusing on their fundamental differences. This section is pretty straightforward, so we’ll keep things short and sweet. 

Several components of both strategies have overlapping elements, but what separates the two is their execution. 

  • Approach: SEO builds organic traffic over time, whereas SEM generates immediate visibility through paid ads.
  • Cost Structure: SEO is typically a time investment rather than a financial one, while SEM requires ad spending to achieve results. New businesses with little to no revenue will often opt for SEO. 
  • Time to Results: SEO takes time but pays off in the long run. SEM offers quick results and is ideal for time-sensitive campaigns or expanding into new markets. 
  • Audience Targeting: SEM provides granular targeting options, while SEO relies on targeting through content alignment and keyword optimization. This makes PPC ideal when a business needs to target a specific audience demographic, which is nearly impossible with SEO. 

And now, the moment you’ve all been waiting for: our pièce de résistance, our magnum opus, our Pride and Prejudice.

Why Businesses Needs Both SEO and SEM

This section is likely to ruffle the most feathers in this entire blog. I opened this article by stating that most marketers fall into one of two camps: They specialize in SEO or SEM. It’s incredibly difficult to be good at both. 

Few people transition from one to the other through their careers, while others prefer to stick to one and never explore the other. Even though SEM and SEO have overlapping approaches, the execution of those strategies is totally different. 

While both marketers heavily rely on search engines, their strategy and how they use the features of each technology will differ based on the traffic they are trying to target. 

In the end, though, both strategies are a must. For example, in recent years, Google has changed how marketers can track campaign data based on traffic sources. SEO marketers will heavily rely on Google Analytics 4 and Google Search Console, while SEM marketers will use Google Analytics 4 and Google Ads. 

However, All these technologies now work together, so you can see how one traffic source impacts your website engagement and overall conversion funnels.  

Google Search Console can now be connected to Google Ads so that when you’re running local ads or a branded campaign, you can see how your paid advertising efforts impact your organic traffic and vice versa. Understanding this relationship determines how aggressively you want to advertise vs. when you should allow your SEO efforts to shine and generate leads/sales with lower acquisition costs.

Balancing Short-Term Gains and Long-Term Growth

Think of SEO and SEM as yin and yang—light and dark. You need to balance SEO and SEM because of how and when traffic converts according to a person’s unique buying journey. 

We’ve already discussed ad nauseam that SEM yields immediate results, but what if you’re in a competitive industry or an industry with extremely high advertising costs? In either case, you need to balance an SEM and an SEO strategy to ensure your brand is top of mind as potential customers search for your products and services.

For example, most tech companies have millions of dollars in seed funding, so they can create SEM campaigns that follow a funnel approach. The campaigns can target top-of-funnel users looking for their technology but not ready to buy.

In exchange for an email address, potential customers may be given a free trial, a white paper, a case study, etc., explaining why one company’s software is better than the other. Then, they can be added to an email drip campaign, which brings them further down the funnel until they are targeted through another paid ad, ultimately convincing them to get a quote or talk to the sales team. 

This strategy works if you have a lot of funds, but what if you’re a small business with limited funds or trying to enter a new market? You will need to invest more time into SEO to build credibility so that you can focus on paid advertising through SEM later.

SEM Diminishing Returns

Only some SEM marketers will tell you that SEM eventually has diminishing returns. There are two significant reasons for this: the first is related to competitive research, and the second is related to optimization limitations. 

Everything in life has a limit. Once you climb Mount Everest, no other mountain is higher than its peak. 

Let’s focus on competitor research first. Businesses might not be aware of this, but you can legally spy on your competitors using competitor research tools like the ones mentioned in this article. Even Google and Microsoft ads have search impression reports inside the platform that give you data on how your campaigns measure up to your competitors based on ad performance and monthly budget allocation. 

Because we can all spy on each other, whatever keywords you’re bidding on or ad copy you’re testing, you’re competitor will eventually try to outperform your best ads and keywords or attempt to spend more money than you per month. 

The second item involves over-optimization. Google Ads is not an ATM. While every business wants to continue increasing sales and lead volume through their SEM efforts, eventually, you reach a point where your campaigns and optimizations plateau (refer to my Mount Everest quote). 

Real World Example

I once worked with a client who refused to invest time or energy into SEO. They preferred immediate results, so they only invested in SEM strategies. On the other hand, their competitors aggressively created content and improved their organic rankings, including updating content related to our client. The competitor content strategy lowered my client’s organic rankings over time. 

To make matters worse, the competitor started bidding on my clients’ branded terms through PPC advertising, drastically increasing my client’s CPC (cost per click) for their branded terms. This put my client in a weird position where it was getting too expensive for them to bid on their own branded terms. 

There is no reason a competitor should pay less for branded terms than the brand that owns the name is paying to run ads for its name. 

In simpler terms, imagine if McDonald’s had to pay Burger King a fine every time McDonalds used its name in a McDonalds advertising campaign. Eventually, McDonalds would have to stop running ads that use their name. 

Now that I have addressed why businesses need to balance their SEO and SEM efforts, let’s discuss how and when you should prioritize one over the other.

When to Prioritize SEO vs SEM

In the above section, I explained why businesses should balance SEO and SEM. Throughout this article, I have provided glimpses into how and when each should be prioritized, but let’s focus a bit more on when to shift between the two. 

Your biggest determining factor for when to prioritize one traffic source over the other will be one of two things: how people search for products and services in your industry and your market penetration within a given market. 

To understand changes in traffic and market penetration, you will want to pay close attention to your traffic data and how people are converting across your website and traffic source. 

The best tools for this task will include Google Analytics 4, Google Search Console, and keyword/competitor research tools like Spyfu, SEMrush, Ahrefs, etc., which allow you to track your SEM and SEO rankings. 

Armed with data, you can make more informed decisions about when to increase your monthly SEM budget to drive traffic, invest in growing your organic presence, and scale back your monthly SEM budget. 

Below are some examples of when to allocate more resources to each traffic source.

When to Prioritize SEO:

  • You are building credibility in a niche (entering a new market, and you want people to like and trust your brand as a leader in that industry/niche).
  • Adopting a budget-conscious approach (Advertising costs within an industry have risen to a point where bidding on those terms is no longer profitable, so you shift your monthly budget to help strengthen your brand awareness by creating compelling and engaging content).
  • Achieving long-term goals through consistent visibility (You determine that improving your brand awareness will have a more significant financial impact in the long term vs. constantly having to bid on specific keywords or demographics in your industry).

When to Prioritize SEM:

  • Running time-sensitive promotions (Perfect for targeting holiday traffic or people needing to solve a problem after a world or life-changing event).
  • Testing keywords for their conversion potential (You identify increased searches or interest for topics within your industry that could increase sales or lead volume per month).
  • Capturing immediate traffic for new product launches (If your company launches a new product or service or is entering a new market, using an SEM campaign is an excellent way of testing the waters to see how receptive people are to your products or services before investing a lot of resources to grow within that market or niche).

Conclusion

Businesses can no longer choose between SEO and SEM to scale their businesses. To stay relevant across search engines and social platforms, you must balance both strategies well.

Don’t get caught in the trap of only focusing on one traffic source. After analyzing hundreds of campaigns and thousands of data points across analytics platforms, I can confirm customers have very complex buying journeys. 

By choosing only one traffic source, you risk being priced out of a market when your needs change and, more importantly, when people begin searching for products in different ways. 

An integrated approach to SEO and SEM is critical to maximizing your digital marketing potential. 

While each offers unique advantages, they are most effective when used together. An SEO strategy supports long-term growth and visibility, while SEM drives targeted, immediate results. 

Whether you’re looking to grow organically, attract short-term customers, or do both, blending Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing ensures your brand remains visible and competitive.

Maintaining this balance allows marketing dollars to go further because you can shift funds according to fluctuations in traffic and competition as potential customers enter and exit your sales funnels. 

If you have any additional questions or want to explore what a blended SEO and SEM strategy looks like, KnewChoice is here to help. 

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