It could be said that online marketing today has 4 main aspects, among which we find SEO (natural search engine positioning), SEM (sponsored positioning or artificial positioning), SMO (positioning in web 2.0 or social networks) and email marketing.
The objective of this analysis is to study the advantages and disadvantages of the first 2, SEO and SEM, to see which is more effective for an online marketing campaign.
First, let's analyze what each one is and what it consists of:
1. Natural or organic positioning (SEO) consists of optimizing a website based on onpage and offpage criteria, in order to increase positions in the results returned naturally by search engines.
to. The onpage criteria are internal and are based mainly on the change of keywords in web pages so that search engines understand that a web page is specialized in a topic and in some specific keywords and is very important to them. This optimization is performed independently for each of the pages of a site.
b. The offpage criteria are external and are based mainly on creating links to a site, and to specific pages of the site. For this, factors such as the anchor text or "anchor text" (the text that appears in the link), the theme of the linked website and the PageRank of the website from which the link is obtained are taken into account. PageRank is a green bar that measures a website's popularity from 0 to 10. A site with more PageRank has greater authority in the eyes of Google and transmits greater popularity to the sites that it links to.
2. Sponsored or artificial positioning (SEM) consists of establishing a payment system through Google Adwords (usually cost per click), which leads you to appear in the ads published by Google above and to the right of the results natural, showing the web higher or lower depending on the offer made on a pay-per-click basis. These work as an auction.
Now that we know what each one is and what it consists of, we can proceed to analyze the advantages and disadvantages they present.
The advantages of natural or organic positioning are as follows:
• Permanent positioning
• Constant positioning
• Positioning in organic results
• Positioning of many keywords
The disadvantages of natural or organic positioning are as follows:
• Medium-long term results
• Delayed return on investment
The advantages of sponsored or artificial positioning are as follows:
• Immediate results
• Very high positioning
• Immediate return on investment
The drawbacks of sponsored or artificial positioning are as follows:
• Very high cost of campaigns
• Difficulties in maintaining continuity in campaigns
• If the campaign is stopped, the web loses all positioning
We therefore observe that sponsored positioning (SEM) achieves short-term results with an immediate return on investment but carries a high price and an interruption in your campaigns means running out of nothing.
On the other hand, natural positioning (SEO) obtains results in the medium-short term (although changes can be noticed a month or two months after starting the campaign), and it takes more time to recover the investment, but the positions obtained are permanent and once the campaign is finished, web traffic by search engines does not stop at any time.
Which is better then? The answer is not simple, depending on the type of company, website and project, interests may be different. In most cases, it is advisable to combine both, and maintain the SEM until the SEO pays off and generates a significant flow of visits, traffic and customers.
However, if it is necessary to choose between one of the two because the budget does not allow more, I think we should choose SEO without any doubt.
