SEO vs. SEM vs. SMM — how can I know the importance for my business? This question is more complicated than it seems. Don’t worry, Majiska team is here to help you to understand these three categories, harnessing their abilities and how to optimize them.

Let’s get started by knowing the differences between SEO vs. SEM vs. PPC.

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), in simple terms, it means the process of improving your site to increase it’s visibility when people search for products or services related to your business in Google, Bing, and other search engines. The better visibility your pages have, the more likely you are to garner attention and attract prospective and existing customers to your business.

Professional companies like Majiska Digital Marketing design a strategic marketing campaign, that will utilise a variety of keywords to enhance your relevance online. The benefit of focusing on these keywords is that you will have control over how you drive traffic to your website. This can help increase the relevancy of your links and keep them high on the search engine results.

The most important aspect for SEO is you don’t pay for instant results, but rather, you pay for time and energy to build your brand through content. This is an organic approach, as the result it will take longer to achieve your marketing goal. However, it is definitely worth the time and effort.

When developing an SEO campaign and optimising your content to reach your target audience efficiently, we always recommend utilising a professional agency like Majiska Digital Marketing to ensure the job is done correctly.

If you are still unsure your website need SEO done or not, check out our detailed blog post about reasons your website need SEO to find out.

What is SEM?

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) helps increase the visibility of a website on major search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo. It is a paid strategy of search marketing. The cost involved are in the form of paid advertising and campaigns. Brands bid for popular keywords and based on their ranking and how much they pay, their website will appear as an ad on a search engine results page. The results are not visible to everyone; however, they are shown to your target audience, which is the most important part.

SEM is a key component of a digital marketing strategy, as the majority of prospects will find a product or service on a Google search. This is a huge opportunity for your business, as there a potential buyers researching your products or services online, hoping to find what they need.

Some platforms will include the word “Ad” next to their search results, which could sometimes prevent your prospect from clicking. This is why sometimes people do prefer SEO, as it is organic. However, you will see SEM bring immediate results, as long as you are paying for advertising.

An established digital marketing company such as Majiska Digital Marketing will help you to understand where every penny of your SEM budget goes, where to optimise them, as well as advising you on next opportunity that may come across the SEM analytics.

What is SMM?

Social Media Marketing (SMM) is a type of paid digital marketing which uses the benefits of a social networking sites such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Youtube, LinkedIn or TikTok as a tool of promoting websites, thus increasing traffic towards them as a learning from user’s direct reactions.

SMM has many goals that you need to prioritise, such as improve communication with users, increase traffic to your website, create brand visibility or reach more potential customers. A marketing agency specialised in SMM or internal marketing team will help to identify your current business stage and help you advise on the SMM goal that may help to grow your business.

Having a Facebook page is almost necessary for digital marketing efforts in the current online marketplace. Having multiple social media accounts on the right network is even better. Posting relevant content regularly and building an engaged audience of followers can help grow your business immensely. Finally, paid social media campaigns have become immensely effective, even rivalling similar efforts made on search engines.

Pro and Cons

All these type of digital advertising have their advantages along with disadvantages. Let’s dive in.

SEO - Search Engine Optimisation

• No need to pay for ads placement in search engines
• Marketing goals take longer to achieve
• Generate more trust towards your brand
• Relies on ever changing state of search engine algorithm and link building

SEM - Search Engine Marketing

• It can get expensive; pay more for ads to get more traffic
• Results are instant
• Cannot be affected by search engine algorithm
• You can track all your results

SMM - Social Media Marketing

• Paid social media service for users to interact with your business
• Pinpoint specific audience to see your ads
• Each social media platform has its own content structure and rules
• If optimised properly, result might be better than same cost spent in SEM

Should I use them together or separately?

If you are getting started, SEO is the way to go. This is because SEO will help to rank your site organically on search engines, which is beneficial for long term.

We never recommend SEM or SMM without SEO well established first. Why? Because with SEM or SMM, brands are paying for traffic to your site. When the prospects click the ads and go to the website, they could not find relevant information. Frustrated by lack of information, they will go back to Google search engine and fired another search. This is an issue in long run because search engines track this and your site quality score will be low. Therefore you will pay more to get traffic to your site.

Once SEO is established, you can use both SEM or SMM, given that you have a high budget. What differentiate SEM from SMM is you pay for keywords, and paying search engines to direct search traffic to your site. While for SSM, your ads will appear in your chosen social media platform and traffic will come from there.

What you choose is ultimately your decision. However, we always highly recommend going with an agency who will able to help you decide the best option for your business. Majiska Digital Marketing team will assure your digital marketing needs fulfilled by understanding what can be improved by your website. From there, we can help you create a solid digital strategy which will help deliver results. Contact Majiska Digital Marketing to get started.