The most important thing every website needs to grow their business is targeted traffic. In fact, targeted traffic is what makes successful websites unique and distinct.

Organic traffic (from search engines) is the main source of targeted traffic. You can either gain targeted traffic by Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or by Search Engine Marketing (SEM.)

In this article, we’ll compare both SEO and SEM, and show you which strategy is the best solution for your business.

Understanding Search Engine Optimization

When it comes to SEO, most owners get it wrong. They think SEO is some kind of tactic that makes a website rank well on Google and hit the top spot of the SERP for some search query.

In fact, the truth is SEO alone can’t bring traffic to your website. SEO is meant to help search engines easily access, crawl and index your website.

If you are optimizing your website for search engines as per the latest search engine standards, you’re helping them to easily access your website so that they can crawl and index your website without any distractions.

SEO consists of 2 different activities:

• On-site SEO: It’s a process of making your website optimized for both search engines as well as the users. This includes adding meta tags, alt tags for images, optimizing website for mobile viewers, increasing the speed of page loading, and much more.

• Off-site SEO: Search engine algorithms work like a rating system where the pages with the most votes rank at the top of the SERP (search engine results page) listing. Note that in this case, votes are the trust worthy links that generate from other websites to your site.

For you as a webmaster, off-site SEO is all about promoting your website across the web so that it gets priority links from other sites. This can help gain your website’s trust in the eyes of search engines.

Understanding Search Engine Marketing

“Search engine marketing is a form of Internet marketing that involved the promotion of websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results pages (SERPS) through optimization and advertising.”Let’s see what Wikipedia says about SEM.

SEO vs. SEM

SEM is a marketing process used to attract organic traffic (SEO) as well as paid search engine traffic.

Here are some key differences between SEO and SEM.

1. Time it takes to generate traffic

Search advertising is one of the quickest ways to bring targeted traffic to your website. You just need to set up an ad campaign, create a landing page on your website, and start advertising. Soon, you’ll start seeing traffic flow to your website.

On the other hand, SEO takes some more time to start driving organic traffic, usually between 3 and 6 months.

2. The cost

If you are PPC (Pay Per Click) advertiser, each click on your ad will cost you. However, you can always stop the ad campaign whenever you wish to stop.

SEO won’t directly cost you for each visit to your website from search engines. In fact, it is one of the most consistent traffic you can rely upon.

Which strategy is best for you?

Every website must focus on increasing search engine visibility, and thereby attract organic traffic. With that in mind, SEO is for almost everyone. However, search advertising is not meant for everyone.

Let’s see who should focus on search advertising and who shouldn’t.

Focus on search advertising…

• If you want to attract targeted traffic to new websites you just rolled out

• If you want to generate more traffic for specific searches that you think would be profitable

Shouldn’t focus on search advertising…

• If you have a new website in a new niche that is less known. In this case, quite possibly, not many people will be searching for it. If you couldn’t be able to afford to buy your traffic.

• Have you ever tried paid advertising? Which strategy is best for your business- SEO or SEM? Share your story with us in the comments. And sign up for our newsletter to learn more.