Khushbu Khandelwal

SEO vs SEM: The Battleground Simply put, SEM is a paid strategy with an immediate impact while SEO is an organic strategy that shows results over time. Creating a paid ad that grabs the attention of a targeted audience using a great message and call to action (CTA), is only a conversion driver for the time being and for as long as you are willing to spend. 93% of digital marketers are investing in paid ads. Leveraging SEM generates traffic, clicks, leads, opportunities, etc. to your website immediately but is not necessarily a sustainable strategy for traffic. Once the spend on your advertisement is up, so is your SEM strategy. SEO, however, takes a different approach. It is believed that SEO has a much larger impact on users than SEM does. Why? Because the first organic result receives a 28.5% CTR while a paid ad only receives a 10% CTR. Organic search drives 53% of web traffic whereas paid drives 27%. While you can see traffic growth with both SEO and SEM separately, you’ll win biggest by doing both together. SEO typically takes longer to gain traction but has better results and much more staying power. Creating content that is well-optimized without spending ad dollars is a long-term plan for ranking high in the SERPs. Because search engines analyze your site content for expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness (E-A-T), it takes time for your pages to increase in ranks. Search engines crawl pages to find unique and high-quality content that is up to date, optimized and well-written for users. If your page is ranking on the first page of a search engine, this indicates search engines trust your information and your site. They are offering users your information as opposed to someone else’s. Because of this, you will see more quality traffic and leads coming to your site. Though your SEM campaign is targeted, sometimes you may see less quality traffic coming from your ad. This can be due to click fraud. Competitors may see your ad and click into it to inflate the number of clicks on your ad costing your company more ad spend. This is a black hat strategy to use up ad spend early on to remove your ad for the rest of the day.