Discover with this brief guide the differences between SEO and SEM, as well as when you should implement one or the other in your business.

You're embarking on a journey, you've defined a business model, and you feel it's time to give your products or services a boost of exposure to increase sales. Ultimately, in the digital realm, it's all about how much traffic you can redirect to generate leads.

But now the decision is whether you need to implement SEO or SEM to attract prospects who can become customers. So, in this instance, we'll explain the difference between the two, as well as some recommendations for their implementation.

What is SEO?

SEO or Search Engine Optimization refers to a set of techniques implemented with the goal of improving the organic ranking of your content or domain within search engine results.

When you perform a search through a search engine like Google, Bing, or even YouTube, the system takes the words you use in the search as keywords and uses an algorithm to determine which websites contain the information you need. Then, based on a scoring system, the algorithm decides which website has better information and displays them in that order in the results list you see on screen.

However, the majority of clicks, and thus the visits, go to the top 10 results. For that reason, it's necessary to compete to secure a position on the first page of results for a specific keyword and thus capture more web traffic for your business, project, service, or product. The challenge is that there's a lot of competition today, making ranking not so straightforward.

To achieve it, a series of techniques are required to communicate to the algorithm that your website or content is better at addressing the user's needs than the competition. This set of techniques is known as SEO.

When you implement these techniques for positioning through SEO, results usually become visible in a minimum of 6 months. Hence, it's a medium-term strategy that requires constant investment in consultation or hiring web traffic professionals to execute the strategies.

However, the beauty of SEO is that once you achieve the ranking, you'll have so much traffic that acquisition costs decrease considerably. Moreover, the results remain for a period of time, allowing you to achieve residual results over time even as you reduce activity.

What is SEM?

SEM or Search Engine Marketing refers to the use of advertising campaigns in search engines that display your links in the top positions of results based on intent.

In other words, here you pay to have search engines display ads for your products or services for a set period of time. This payment is typically made when the user clicks on the ad or for a certain number of times the ad is displayed on screen.

With SEM, you can reach your ideal customer more quickly, but this requires constant optimization of the campaigns. Remember that just like you, many companies want to advertise their products or services.

It offers much more refined segmentation capabilities than SEO, allowing you to capture highly qualified traffic for your sales. It's not necessary to invest large amounts of money to achieve good results.

Its weakness is that it's more costly in the long term, effective only when you pay, and competition makes it necessary to increase investment. Another downside is that users are aware that it's a paid link, so they tend to be more cautious about clicking.

When to Implement SEO or SEM?

Ideally, working with both SEO and SEM together achieves the best of both worlds. If you're just starting out, as with any business, advertising (SEM) should be more intense at first as you need to make yourself known.

Therefore, it's recommended to initially use SEM to start acquiring customers while you work on your SEO strategy.

Once you achieve the organic ranking you desire, you can use SEM sporadically when you need to communicate something important to your community, like a launch or special offer.

Conclusion

SEO refers to a set of techniques implemented to position your products, services, or content in the top search results for specific keywords.

Meanwhile, SEM is positioning your products, services, or content in prominent areas of the search engine through paid ads that charge for each click the user makes.

Neither is better or worse; the ideal is that they work together to achieve the expected search engine traffic and gradually reduce customer or audience acquisition costs.

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