In today’s digital world, search engine optimization is one of the most crucial things to ensure the viability and profitability of any business or company. Every business desires to improve its ranking in the search results, and there are two different ways to accomplish this–paid and organic.

Definitions

Organic search refers to the traffic results in the search engine that are earned based on search engine optimization (SEO) without the benefits of paying for optimization (Kidd, 2024). On the other hand, paid search refers to advertisements seen at or near the top of the search results typically labeled as “sponsored,” where businesses have paid to improve their rankings in the results, often known as SEM (Lenhard, 2024). While companies employ both, a comprehensive understanding of the pros and cons of both methods is essential in order to understand how to use these effectively.

(Blue Laser Digital, 2023; Garrate, 2023; Kidd, 2024; Lenhard, 2024; WebFX, n.d.)

As indicated in this chart, both strategies have advantages and disadvantages. Ideally, companies will learn to use them in perfect harmony. While there is no “one-size-fits-all” solution, finding a balance that suits the business goals is a journey that will boost website traffic, visibility, lead generation, and revenue (Kidd, 2024). A strategic combination of SEO and SEM will ultimately complement each other, building long-term organic traffic while resulting in quick wins from paid traffic.

Working Together

While the benefits of combining SEO and SEM are clear in theory, the actual execution can be challenging. Understanding how these two strategies work together can be a game-changer. Here are a few time-tested ideas:

1. Share keyword data between SEO and SEM to build organic content and advertisements that attract search engine users.
2. Share the insights and metrics compiled by SEO and SEM to discover what content is resonating with the audience immediately and over time.
3. Balance the cost and visibility between SEO and SEM by optimizing organic presence in order to reduce keyword costs and rank while acquiring immediate attention from paid ads and visibility.

(Edwards, 2024)

Case Study: HubSpot

In order to illustrate this more fully, it is vital to explore a potential scenario to understand how to put these tactics into practice. While there are a variety of methods that can be used, one that is especially appealing is the way HubSpot uses these two methods concurrently. While this company uses a wide variety of SEM strategies, it begins with SEO-optimized marketing resources, such as blogs, webinars, ebooks, and more (Shumaker, 2024). It uses SEO to optimize its valuable content marketing that addresses a wide variety of pain points and interests of its target audience. Once optimized through keywords, research, and other SEO tools, paid search ads promote the content to reach even more people, including buyers ready to purchase the services the company sells. HubSpot also uses keywords that are selected and optimized through SEO and SEM to ensure that they appear in relevant searches. Finally, visitors who have interacted with both the organic and paid content of the company are retargeted through ads to encourage the people to return and make a purchase. When using retargeting, HubSpot remains in the minds of its visitors. By using the combination of SEO and SEM, Hubspot has significantly increased its website traffic and helped it to emerge as a leader in marketing among its competitors.

Conclusion

While finances and time can significantly impact the use of both strategies, all companies can benefit from a strategic blend of SEO and SEM to improve and optimize their ranking and visibility in the global marketplace. All companies must take the time to examine how they can use both strategies to benefit their companies in the best way possible, thus ensuring maximum exposure and exemplary authority.

References

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