Think about the last time you whipped your phone out to google useful information. It could be to find the tastiest nearby place to get brunch, know what time your favourite shows drop on any streaming service, find out the latest trending news, or even check out the current state of the stock market. Chances are, it hasn’t been that long since you’ve last used Google.
Search engines like Google and Bing have helped us search and consume information. That’s why businesses have to learn to adapt to this cultural and social reform, so they can stay on top of the competition. It’s possible for you to use search engines as a marketing tool in a way that can benefit your business. Two ways that you can utilise search engine’s to your brand’s advantage is by searching SEO and SEM services in Singapore.
Why do SEO and SEM matter so much?
But before you decide on whether you need SEO or SEM, how can you utilise search engines in such a way as to benefit your business?
Well, it’s simple. Millions of users visit websites on a daily basis to search for valuable information. If you show up at or near the top of the rankings for highly popular keywords, that can potentially generate a lot of traffic to your website. This has a lot of implications for businesses.
Firstly, it means that more people are exposed to your content and might become interested in your company, secondly, this means that you can market more of your products and services to more people, and finally, you can increase brand recognition and turn your website into an avenue to sell your products much more efficiently.
In an era where people heavily rely on digital technologies for their source of information, the work that SEO and SEM agencies in Singapore do is indispensable. We shouldn’t underestimate the prevalence that search engines have had on our lives. That’s why businesses use search engines to promote their websites, highlight their web content, help customers to find them, and many other marketing services. Search engines also provide you with numerous tools at your disposal to market to people more effectively.
A crash course on SEO and SEM
If you don’t already know, SEO and SEM are two very different approaches to marketing on search engines. Let’s see what they actually are.
SEO, short for search engine optimisation services, is a marketing practice that differs from SEM because it mostly uses unpaid or organic strategies. What does it mean? This isn’t to say that you don’t pay for the services, but that SEO plans and strategies revolve around improving the content of your website, making it more accessible to search engines. This includes link building and cleaning, keyword analysis, and content creation. SEO is more focused on long term goals and helping you naturally rank higher without forcing you to rely on paid ads or promotions.
SEM, also known as search engine marketing services, is a marketing practice that involves the use of paid strategies to market your business’s site much better. SEM is more similar to traditional ways of marketing, where you utilise promotions and advertise your content using Google’s platform. Paid searches, boosting rankings, and other paid schemes fall under SEM. These SEM services involve the use of the search engine’s built-in marketing tools such as data analytics and promoting search results. These sites require you to pay to promote your web content.
SEO is concerned with helping you boost your content rankings by improving the quality of your site’s content over the long term, while SEM allows you to get much quicker results by promoting your web content. Both strategies involve improving your exposure to users on the search engine.
We know more about SEO and SEM now. Which is better?
Which is better, SEO or SEM?
While SEO and SEM both utilise search engines as a marketing tool, you can clearly see how the two of these can be different. But is one actually necessarily better than the other? It is common for many companies to focus more on SEM and SEO strategies, and the way that either of these works can be different from what you initially might think.
In reality, both SEO and SEM rely on each other to work. Your website is the end product of what you want to advertise, so you should try your best to improve your content for the searches in order to present a good view to your visitor. On the other hand, if you’re a new startup or a company that needs more exposure, then utilising paid strategies like promotions or ads can greatly benefit you because it can attract a larger audience in a shorter amount of time.
However, because of the nature of SEM, it may be more expensive than SEO because of its nature. Not only do you have to set aside a budget for paying for the SEM company, you also have to take into account your budget for creating promotions and advertisements, as well as the price of having the ad stay up there for any length of time. There are also other payment methods like pay per click, which requires you to pay a larger sum when more people click on your ads and links.
In many cases, it might be bad for your business to rely solely on either one. There’s no use in having highly visible ads or being exposed to many people if your website boasts low quality content that no one wants to read or that anyone would be disinterested in, and there’s also no use in having great quality content if there’s no one to read it because your website is poorly exposed or marketed.
When choosing to avail of an SEO or SEM vendor’s services, look closely at your individual circumstances to see whether you deserve one or the other. SEO does better than SEM in some capacities, and vice versa.
For example, SEO is better if you have time to wait for more results because most SEO plans consist of long term strategies aimed to retain customers. On the other hand, if you want more immediate results, then an SEM strategy might work better for your company because paying for promoted ads puts your website and your content in a highly visible place. This is great for boosting viewership over a shorter period of time, but after the pay period, your promotion will end.
OOm is an SEO and SEM vendor in Singapore. Contact us to see a comprehensive list of digital marketing services that we provide.
