SEO + SEM: How They Can Work Harmoniously For Your Digital Marketing

“How do I get my website to the top of Google when people search for…” has been a pain point for many business owners in the evergrowing competitive digital landscape.

There are a number of factors that go into improving your website’s search engine ranking. Before we dive into those options, let’s break down how you will invest your marketing and advertising budget:

Search engine optimization (SEO): SEO pertains to owned media and will use your marketing budget (i.e. Your website and/or blog). Broadly-speaking, making necessary improvements to different areas of your website can positively impact your website’s performance, user experience, and organic search engine results.

Search engine marketing (SEM): SEM pertains to paid media and will use your advertising budget (i.e. Search ads). Certain keywords of interest relevant to your website’s content and your industry can be bidded on to feature your website higher up in the paid search engine results.

The difference here is: organic vs. paid. Even though the marketing techniques are different between these two efforts, both SEO and SEM rely heavily on keywords to drive traffic. You don’t absolutely need to invest in both, but there are plenty of reasons why you should consider it. 

Here are three ways investing in both SEO and SEM can work together in harmony to improve your digital marketing results:

Relevant content ✏️

If your website page does not have relevant content to what an organic user searches, your website will likely not even appear on the first page of search results. If your website page is not relevant to what content your paid ad is bidding on, your user will likely leave your website and your search engine results.

The common denominator here is relevant content. This remains the key to determining whether these users will engage with your website at all. SEO sets the stage for a successful SEM effort.

Research? + testing = ❤️

Which brings us to our next point. You can learn a lot about your audience from doing both SEO and SEM. Compare analytics for organic search users and your paid search users, such as:

• Top performing keywords from your search term report to help keep your SEO content fresh
• Paid vs. organic user performance on a specific landing page
• Which devices do paid and organic users perform best on
  • I.e. Spend your money on terms (SEM) that you do not rank well for organically (SEO).

Diversifying traffic channels ?

Improving your website through SEO efforts, and thus making your content more relevant, can bring in many new users via organic search. Investing in SEM can bring in many new users to your website for a specific target audience you are interested in growing.

Bringing in a healthy amount of new users to your website will allow you to not only expand your audience, but to draw more insights about them and continue to make their experience better than before. All in all, the goal is to be as efficient with your budget as possible, so the more you invest time into these two strategies together, the more cost-efficient your campaigns will become!