Question

Evaluate the list of pros and cons for SEM. Describe in your own words why you think it may be important to use both parts of SEM. What may happen if you only use PPC? Or only SEO? 100 words minimum

Answer 1

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is a digital marketing strategy used to increase the visibility of a website in search engine result page. It is the way to get free traffic from search engines and paid search ads. Paid search ads are the process of paying for the ads to appear on search engine research pages.

Pros of SEM -

1) Cost control - By having a payment set-up, we can easily establish a budget for our daily spending.

2) We can get a direct return on investment.

3) Instant website traffic - quickly we start receiving visitor's traffic.

Cons of SEM -

1) High competition

2) HIgh complexity as technical to manage.

3) Results decay quickly once the ad budget runs out.

Importance of both parts of SEM -

SEM has two main pillars: SEO and PPC

When you can get SEO and PPC working together, you will often be able to drive results that are greater than their own component

1) The total volume of traffic can be increased by targeting clicks in paid (PPC) and organic (SEO) for high performing keywords.

2) High-cost keywords, high volume or low converting keywords can be moved from PPC to organic search(SEO).

3) Remarketing allows to stay in front of visitors after initial touch via organic search(SEO) and customize messaging around their engagement with your site.

4) We can test our keywords in PPC before using it in our long term SEO strategies.

5) Target users at all stages of the customer journey from research to comparison to purchase with a commercial keyword.

For high growth and aggressive marketing, it is necessary to develop a search engine strategy rather than look at SEO and PPC in isolation.

If we only use PPC, it can get prohibitively expensive and on the other hand,  SEO is often cheaper in the long term. So if we use both It is optimum utilization of money. SEO takes time whereas PPC allows for quick experimentation. Therefore using PPC before SEO can be useful. PPC can lose effectiveness in the long run and on the other hand Organic traffic has staying power.

Thus if we use both PPC and SEO, it will be useful but sometimes it depends on the situation you are working in as both PPC and SEO has their own advantages and disadvantages.