For many years, brands and businesses seeking to expand their digital footprints have sought the benefits of search engine optimization. Through SEO, boosting your website’s visibility in key search results is possible – but increasingly, it is no longer the only way for brands to become visible.

Through a complex series of both paid and organic marketing efforts, brands now have choices. However, the value of SEO shouldn’t be forgotten – merely enhanced.

As such, we’ll discuss how search engine marketing – which encompasses the world of SEO as well – is more effective than mere SEO alone.

SEO Takes Tons of Time

The single biggest criticism of SEO isn’t that it doesn’t work: it’s that it takes forever to see results. In even marginally-competitive niches and SERPs, it may be months before your website and its specific pages are ranking on the first page of search results. While pinging to Google the content you’d be creating anyway doesn’t cost you much time itself, it is the waiting before you are actually visible to search engine users that makes SEO so frustrating.

Additionally, cultivating optimized content for search engine optimization requires an ample investment of time. In short, most who are successful at SEO spend hundreds of hours over a period of months creating their content, optimizing it and then simply waiting for it to appear prominently in search.

SEM Bridges the Gaps of SEO

While SEO can take copious amounts of time to pay off, it is still a valid tactic. With search engine marketing, you focus on enhancing the effects of your SEO efforts by including a variety of paid marketing strategies. PPC marketing is the most common method of doing such.

PPC campaigns can be deployed almost instantly, allowing you to reach the very same audiences you wish to target whether or not your SEO campaigns are paying off yet. This is highly beneficial for new brands, as waiting for several months for the SEO improvements to kick in can result in missing valuable clicks and conversions.

Likewise and in the event your SEO take a hit due to algorithm changes in the future, a broader SEM approach can offset any losses in traffic. Even if everything is functioning as intended on the SEO front, using PPC campaigns and other forms of paid marketing will only boost overall performance.

SEM Can Actually Improve SEO

Various tasks related to PPC campaigns and paid marketing can actually provide tangible benefits that’ll improve your SEO efforts over time. If you’re pinging to Google a variety of PPC campaign ads, you can use its interface to uncover a litany of recommended keywords that produce higher rates of conversions. These keywords can then be utilized in your broader SEO efforts as well.

You’ll also reach a greater share of the audience, thereby generating brand recognition. Inevitably, a greater percentage of your target audience will search for your brand specifically in the future, which can bolster the credibility and authority of your brand in search engine algorithms.

SEM is simply a more comprehensive strategy than SEO, and that makes it a better choice for most brands. Both paid marketing and organic strategies like SEO still have places in modern-day marketing: combining them can produce an even stronger outcome that bolsters online brands.