SEO & SEM - Can't we all just get along?

Here's what you need to know about these two acronyms:

SEO = Search Engine Optimization
SEO is simply optimizing the keywords and links to your site and improving other aspects of your site to maximize your search engine rankings, resulting in an increase in traffic. Potential customers are already searching for your products and services, and by positioning your business at the top of the search engine results page (SERP) they will find you! SEO increases your organic (non-paid) search results.

SEM = Search Engine Marketing
SEM places your text ads to appear as sponsored listings on the SERPs (top and right-hand side of the page). It allows you to put your business in front of potential customers at the precise moment they're searching for what you sell. SEM makes it easy to test different ad copy, target local areas or the entire nation, and control your budget through spending limits and campaign optimization. Because your keywords are tailored to your business, you reach only those people interested who are interested, and only pay for your ad when it's clicked on! SEM increases your paid search results.

With the basics out of the way, you're probably wondering now why you'd pay for search results with SEM when you can get the organic results for free with SEO.

Think of it this way, if you've put the time and effort into creating, maintaining, and optimizing an SEM campaign to drive traffic to your website, you need your website to be set up correctly to give them what they came to find. If you can bring someone to your site but they can't find what they want immediately, your SEM is a waste.

From Raise My Rank SEO Services:

You only have a few seconds to convince them that your site can deliver what they want. Will your visitors, failing to find what they're looking for, click their browser's back button and try another site?

Your site has to be ready for your visitors. It needs to be written, structured, and coded in such a way that the information is clearly laid out and easy to find. If it isn't, your site will either be immediately forgotten by visitors, or worse, it will be remembered as one that fails to deliver.

On the other hand, SEO can take 6 months to fully optimize, which can be a long time to wait if you need to see results sooner or if you have a limited-time offer.

Gareth O Neill, a Microsoft Media Specialist, says:

If you do SEO properly then you will get clicks for free but if you have a fresh offer your site will take time to get spidered and start showing up in the organic listings.

This is where SEM will deliver better results. You can create the campaign straight away [...] and have your ads appearing in the paid listings.

For example, if you have an entertainment site and big news has come out from Hollywood or you have a computer games site and the latest game has just hit the shops, then there is nothing as quick as PPC to provide you with visibility.

So now what? Well, the bottom line is that your SEO and SEM should be working together. Here's just one great reason why your SEO and SEM should suck it up and be friends, from AllthingsSEM.com:

Recently Google made public some changes to their AdSense program. These changes include the addition of a quality score that is used when determining the cost of an ad. This quality score will mean that two exact ads will have different costs depending on the quality of the destination page. Although there are many factors that will be used to measure the quality of the destination page, most of these factors can be influenced by SEO. In fact, improving the quality of a web page as perceived by the search engines is pretty much what all SEO is about. So if you use SEO to increase the quality of your site, you will end up reducing the cost per click of your ads.

And now you know (and knowing is half the battle).



(Courtesy of Microsoft Advertising Community, All Things SEM, and Raise My Rank)