How To Make SEO and SEM Work Together

First let’s define each…

SEM: (Search Engine Marketing) the process of gaining traffic by purchasing ads on search engines. It is also called Pay Per Click and Cost Per Click marketing as that is how the ads are sold.

SEO: (Search Engine Optimization) the process of affecting the visibility of a website in a search engines organic search results.

I started out writing a blog on SEO VS. SEM. It seemed like a strong topic at the time, so I began reading articles and researching statistics. The more I read, the more I realized that the two are actually fairly complementary to each other.

Now that we know what each of these marketing strategies are, lets talk about how they work for you.

Search engine optimization is a slow and steady process. It can take several months for results to even show up in a search engine. Search engine marketing works pretty much immediately. Its not always cheap, but it will help you drive large amounts of traffic to your webpage very quickly.

With that being said. why not use SEM to boost your website traffic while waiting on your SEO campaign to show progress? It does not hurt to add a little SEM to your marketing campaign. Think of SEM as that quick shot of espresso you take while you wait for your cup of SEO coffee to kick in.