Many people think that there’s a battle between SEO and SEM for highest placement in search result page but, not many people realize that these two practices can actually work together to get the better and even the best result. While search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) are different, but they have similar goal which to bring as many traffic to a website.
SEO
The practice of SEO focusing on the inside (page title, alt tags of image, page speed and many more), and outside (mainly with link building) of a website. The main objective of search engine optimization is to get much traffic organically, without any payment. With search engine websites crawl more than thousands website every single day by using their spiders and robots. Then, search engine websites will display authoritative and relevant results based on what user’s search and website that have been crawled and indexed.
Search engine websites measuring websites by their quality of website’s code and usability. These websites are also reviewed the contents of a website and determine if there’s a match with what user is looking for. There are ways to have better quality of content matches with user’s search.
The first and the most important step in SEO practice is keyword research. With having list of content types that users might looking for, the website can easily found by users online. Do not try to create content that’s interesting by your vision only, create topic that users are looking for. Link building is the next important step in SEO practice. Back then, SEO practice can used by spamming poor link quality, and unoriginal content that can tricked many users to visit website that didn’t match with what they were looking for.
But now, with Google getting smarter and updating their search algorithm like Panda and Penguin, poor SEO practices are not as effective as before. Social media is another ways for link building technique. Sharing content to social sites like Google+, Twitter, Facebook and many more is the best way for promoting content that could be notice by others. When users read content and they like it, they tend to share content’s address in their status or they could put the address in content that created as reference. This natural link building is what Google wants and loves.
SEM
Online marketers are using SEM by generating variety techniques to market website page or content. Mostly by using paid advertising. There are various paid advertising techniques, such as Google Adwords, YouTube ads, Twitter ads, Facebook ads and others. These SEM techniques have different amount of cost. Because it depends on the market and content that wanted to advertise. Online marketers set their daily budget limit and paid based on the how many clicks that their ads receive. Similar to SEO, successful SEM ads will get the top position of result page that match with keyword that users used when they looking for specific product or service.
To get ads shown at the top or close to the top position, online marketers are basically using Pay-Per-Click (PPC) technique, this technique is the most popular at Google Adwords. Then Google will rank ad based on the amount cost spent on particular targeted keyword and overall quality score of ad. Quality score determined by estimating the quality of ads and landing page for keyword that is being search.
How to use SEO and SEM together to get the best result
With the correct strategy, these two practices can complement each other. SEM practice is for earning organic traffic and SEM practice is to help creating more effective and targeted advertising campaign that is helping website shown for the words that didn’t get rank organically. Basically, SEO is to earn traffic through unpaid or free listing technique, meanwhile SEM is to buy traffic by paid search listing. If SEO and SEM working together correctly, the result will be better than either of them working individually. The important factor to keep in mind is that these two practices are only as good as the website that’s got marketed. Website needs to provide quality that Google requiring for what it thinks users are looking for, if not the SEO and SEM practice won’t be noticed and hard to find.
