SEM vs. SEO: Strengths & Synergies
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Written By Reprise Media | May 2, 2005 | Share This
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Search Engine Marketing is a broad term that encompasses various tactics for exploring online brand communications and initiating customer contact. Those tactics, including natural site optimization (or organic search) and sponsored (or paid) listings offer distinct benefits that, when properly balanced, can work together to serve the customer from all sides.
Search marketing, in all its […]
Search Engine Marketing is a broad term that encompasses various tactics for exploring online brand communications and initiating customer contact. Those tactics, including natural site optimization (or organic search) and sponsored (or paid) listings offer distinct benefits that, when properly balanced, can work together to serve the customer from all sides.
Search marketing, in all its incarnations, has become such a worthwhile service because it legitimately serves all parties involved - from the engine technologies providing the most relevant search listings, to the brands conveying their services and products, to the end consumers who rely on these various listings to navigate the Web. While SEM spans both paid and organic listings, straddling the lines of “church and state”, it also represents the first form of advertising in which the user truly requests the advertisement. For that reason alone, search marketing offers what is undoubtedly the most compellingly personal dialogue between brands and consumers.
As an SEM provider, we understand the finer points of search spiders and algorithms, ad-products, and the meeting-place they create between marketers and consumers. Even when managing pay-for-placement alone, there are certain best practices we recommend to our clients on the SEO side, because the two feed off each other. At the same time, the paid component can be influential in funneling traffic from these highly motivated searches to the sales and research channel. The two compliment each other more than most advertisers realize.
We’ve found that all web marketers need to strike a balance between these seemingly disparate elements of paid and organic search, recognizing the unique benefits and deficiencies of each route. Below we provide insight to how the two disciplines differ from one another, and then create a picture of the synergies between the two.
SEO: Unbiased, Free, Unpredictable
PROS
- Organic listings are a trusted source of information, believed to be unbiased and indexed solely by the automated methods of an objective third-party
- Natural search traffic provides a steady stream of traffic over time
- Costs are frontloaded; once pages are optimized for organic search, low ongoing maintenance fees make it cost-efficient for marketers on a limited budget
CONS
- Organic results can be unfocused in their content and occasionally misconstrued through automation
- There’s little control over which terms your pages will be linked with or how well they get ranked
- Relatively low control over your listing copy - automated technology decides what’s displayed
- Organic listings have to be optimized well in advance of the intended pay-off and require great insight to production efforts down the road
- Engine requirements can be at odds with site design and architecture; it is often difficult to present information that is both accessible to search spiders and carefully designed to influence consumer behavior
For these reasons, it becomes important to actively monitor organic listings and brand rankings within. There is no substitute for a proper SEO program and the natural traffic it provides.
SEM: Predictable, Controllable, Costly
PROS
- Paid traffic comes with a measure of predictability, allowing marketers to forecast both volume and cost-efficiency for relevant metrics
- The free-market bidding system offers full access to a target audience and the opportunity to scale campaigns and pursue them aggressively, creating synergies with sales promotions
- Paid traffic can provide a boost to site volume when most needed
- Creative is completely customizable, to further the user’s search intent and strategically position a brand within that search engine dialogue
- Paid listings are manually generated, and constructed with more awareness to the environment and a consumer’s true intent
- Sponsored ads are known to drive more sales than ordinary search links, converting at higher rates
CONS
- Paid listings can get very expensive across competitive keywords, where market forces can quickly inflate cost-per-clicks
- A certain portion of the customer base is wary of paid listings
In the short term, SEM is known to be more immediate, manageable, and easier to align with sales strategy than SEO techniques. To reach all audiences, by gender, demographic and behavior, marketers really need to consider both options.
Search Synergies
There are many points of connection between SEO and SEM, many of which suggest actual synergies in strategy and execution. While users might prefer one type of listing over another, the effect typically evens out across a diversified search program.
- Top placements across both paid and organic can increase the user’s likelihood to click up to 500%
- Visitors from paid search ads convert at a much higher rate when their keywords and critical words and phrases are conveyed prominently in headlines and body text. The same is true of SEO traffic. Once you get past the mechanics of these two routes to search traffic, you realize they serve the same basic need, which is to create a dialogue between brands and consumers seeking out those products
- Pay-for-placement pricing forecasts can be run to ascertain keyword-specific search opportunities, to further clarify priorities within SEO copy-writing
- Enhanced navigability and streamlined organization of a website’s contents will create more direct landing pages for critical keywords shared by both SEO and pay-for-placement
- Critical gaps in SEO coverage can be filled through the paid component, to guarantee coverage and voice across all priority targets
- Pay-for-placement keywords can be bought to support new content, while SEO efforts need to build over time when that search demand is created
- Consumers are more accustomed to click paid listings for action-oriented searches (copy that includes prices and rates)
- Pay-for-placement represents a cheaper, more practical way to claim low-volume tail terms that don’t draw substantial search volume individually
Randy Schwartz is Director of Strategic Development at Reprise Media.
Topics: SEM: Paid Search |
Great article, l like what you have to say on seo.