Currently, the digital world encompasses more of our daily lives. Every day, more and more people lose their fear of starting their own business, with the internet being one of the safest and fastest ways to establish a presence. Others already have years of experience and continue to improve day by day with the tools it offers. If you are just starting out in the digital world, online marketing, and social media, you have probably heard some terms that you may not be very familiar with. These terms are important to understand what they mean and everything they can do for you when you are preparing your digital strategy.
SEO and SEM are two types of practices that favor the position of your company on the internet. Both are digital marketing strategies. SEO is an organic web positioning strategy, and SEM is a paid positioning strategy. Here I will explain in detail what each of them is good for.
Search Engine Optimization is the process of optimizing a website to increase its popularity on the internet. The goal is to make your website searchable and relevant for search engines, so that it can be displayed to users.
The ultimate goal is for your website to appear in user searches, preferably on the first page and within the top five results, without having to pay additional costs for it.
To achieve this, a series of actions need to be taken. If you have any doubts about it, you might be interested in our article: "How to have good SEO and not die trying?"
Remember, a well-optimized website has a greater chance of ranking high in search engine results.
Search Engine Marketing is basically promoting your website using paid ads, for which there are different platforms such as Google Ads, to reach users who show the most interest in your product or service through search or display campaigns, social media, among others. You pay for the clicks obtained by your ad, and there are different advertising spending strategies, which are explained in our article: 10 SEM strategies for your business.
Using SEM is an important strategy for your business, and for this, you need excellent planning and a good understanding of the objectives you are seeking with the campaign.
Both positioning strategies must be measured to optimize our strategies and achieve the best results. With Google's Analytics tool, we can measure all the data obtained with the organic and paid traffic we bring to the website through our campaign.
To make both concepts clearer, I will define what the differences are between the two strategies:
When using SEO, we do not generate any cost for the visits we bring to the website; with SEM, we have to pay for each of the visits and data generated.
Therefore, our best recommendation would be to use both tools, as one will serve for the daily positioning of your brand and the other will provide measurable data to define the best short, medium, and long-term paid advertising strategy.
