In these days of technological revolutions and robust eCommerce, you need to level up the digital marketing game for your small business if you don’t want to hit a dead end. But creating a website and posting on social media once in a while has gotta be enough, right? Well, no, it’s not enough.

Search engines and digital platforms are getting more advanced and competitive every day. How these platforms perceive your business decides its growth and success. While almost every business owner knows about SEO (Search Engine Optimization), only some of them have explored the domain of SEM (Search Engine Marketing).

When it comes to SEO and SEM, many people struggle to differentiate between the two and to decide which one is better and more important than the other. To find out answers to all these questions and to how small businesses can grow using SEO and SEM, continue reading.

Benefits of SEO for Small Business

1. Reach

SEO is the most effective way to expand your online reach, more so than conventional offline marketing tactics. Small businesses can save a lot of time and resources by opting for and investing in a good SEO strategy. By implementing a powerful SEO strategy, using the right keywords, you can show up in the search engine and reach your target audience.

For that, you need to research your target audience and potential customers to know what they are searching for. With high-quality content that ranks on the first page of google, you can not only multiply outreach to local audience but compete on an international level as well.

2. Brand Awareness

SEO can help improve the brand awareness of your small business. SEO will make sure your online brand presence is noticed by making your business appear in search results. Whether you get clicks or not, people will become familiar with your brand’s name, associated with the relevant keyword.

The goal is to make people aware of your company’s presence, whether they buy from you at the moment or not. So, whenever they need a product or service that you are offering, or get asked about one, your brand’s name will come to mind. People are more likely to buy from a brand they have been seeing in online search results over the one that they have just come across or that doesn’t have a noticeable online presence.

3. Better Conversion Rates

One of the top benefits of SEO for small businesses is better conversion rates. While SEO does not directly increase the conversion of leads, it does have an impact on conversion rates. The benefits of high-quality SEO content directly affect other aspects of your web presence which in turn affects the conversion rates. For implementing proper SEO, there are several boxes you need to check.

Those changes include creating high-quality content that ranks and that people like improving user experience, and website design and navigation. All these factors not just improve your website’s rankings but your company’s credibility as well. This holds people’s attention on your website for longer with a higher likelihood of converting.

4. Gives Competitive Edge

Imagine you have a competitor selling similar goods as you do, at a similar price point, with everything else being equal. The only difference is that you have an SEO-optimized website and your competitor doesn’t. Considering the above-mentioned benefits of SEO, who do you think has a competitive edge over the other? That’s right, you!

Even if there is no other difference between your small business and your competitor’s, SEO will still provide you an upper hand in terms of traffic, leads, brand awareness, and conversion. This applies even if your competitors are stronger than you. Investing in a smart SEO strategy can help you surpass those bigger corporations on search engines. You know what else this entails, right? That if your competitors are investing in SEO and you are not, you are having a major setback

What is SEM

SEM, short for Search Engine Marketing, is an umbrella term that includes all the marketing strategies of paid advertising. SEM differs from SEO in a way that the former refers only to paid search engine marketing while SEO gets results from organic search results.  

SEM includes Pay Per Click (PPC), retargeting, AdWords, enhanced campaigns, and other forms of paid google advertising. Keep reading to find out how SEM can benefit your small business.

Benefits of SEM for Small Business

1. Tested and Targeted Campaigns

SEM allows you to run targeted and results-driven marketing campaigns. Small businesses can test campaigns to access how they are performing. The statistics you can check include clicks, impressions, conversions, plus other such metrics. That way you can see precise results, about what’s working and what’s not.

With precise insights and performance reports, small businesses can optimize their campaigns to maximize output. SEM allows direct targeting of marketing campaigns on your prospects through keywords, geographic and demographic measures, also the time and days your audience is active.

2. Affordable

One of the most important benefits of SEM for Small Businesses is that it’s effective yet affordable. The investment to be made for SEM is much lower than other methods of conventional advertising. There is no big investment involved but you get solid and fast results. SEM saves important resources for your business.

With SEM you can analyze every action that visitors perform on your website, like downloads, sign-ups, purchases, and others. That way you can know for sure what marketing tactics are performing and what are not, so you can focus on the successful ones while subtracting the cost from others. Also, there is no minimum investment required for an SEM campaign, so small businesses can get started according to their budget.

SEO or SEM - Which is Better for Your Small Business

Most people feel conflicted about choosing between SEO and SEM, and the value of the two is often compared with each other. But here’s the truth, you don’t have to choose, in fact, you shouldn’t choose one over the other, not when you can maximize results by using both together. 

SEO and SEM are best used together and help small businesses grow to their fullest potential. While the two differ from each other, they make a power duo for your business’s marketing requirements. 

How do SEO and SEM Work Together?

Individually, both SEO and SEM provide efficient results, but rather than preferring one over the other, you can maximize the profits by teaming them together. SEO and SEM perform differently but they work to achieve the same goal. SEO provides long-term organic results but needs time and consistency to generate those results. SEM provides fast and targeted results but requires investment and complete optimization of the campaigns.

The timespan varies but the ultimate goal is the same, driving traffic to the website. The techniques of SEO and SEM complement each other enabling faster achievement of the ultimate goal. SEM profits from targeted keyword searches to generate traffic, and SEO works to convert and turn that traffic into loyal customers.

To answer the question, of how do SEO and sem work together, the effort and consistency you put into SEO will back up the strategic performance of SEM for even quicker results. Small businesses can create a stronger digital marketing strategy by smartly merging both SEO and SEM into an optimized campaign to generate more effective, quicker, and successful results.

Summing Up

As much as SEO and SEM are two important and efficient digital marketing pillars, using both of these together into one cohesive strategy can accelerate your small business growth. Investing in one of these techniques is crucial, but joining SEO and SEM can put you ahead of your competitors.