SEM Advantages and Disadvantages
Digital marketing has many points, but without a doubt, SEO and SEM are the fundamental pillars of any online positioning strategy. In this article I will talk about SEM advantages and disadvantages, as well as the reasons why you include this strategy in your projects
What is SEM?
SEM comes from the acronym in English (Search Egine Marketing) and originally referred to any action, paid or not, made within the Internet search engines. That is, initially SEO and SEM were in the same pack. With the passage of time this changed, and currently SEM only refers to the payment actions within the search engines.
To carry out these strategies, it will be necessary to use tools and platforms to enhance our visibility. These tools are offered by the search engines themselves, the most famous being Google Ads and Bing Ads.
Now that you know what we’re talking about, it’s time to show you the advantages and disadvantages of SEM.
SEM Advantages
There are many SEM advantages . Next, I will list the ones that from my point of view are the most interesting:
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Visibility: when an investment is made in advertising, our website will be placed in the top of the ranking, in case the campaign is done well. If we leave on the first page we will be seen by more users than we do in others. In addition, ads are more striking than organic results, so we will see more.
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Increase of the traffic: it is simple, when having a greater visibility, more users will click to us, and our traffic will increase. In this way we will achieve a high volume of traffic in the short term.
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Segmentation: when conducting campaigns we can divide our audience as we are interested. Whether by age, sex, location, and even interest. In this way we will only aim at the public that we consider of quality.
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Monitoring: the tools offer us a large amount of data, and in this case we can get to know even what has been the keyword that has motivated that click. On the other hand, thanks to the analytical we can know perfectly the behavior of these users.
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Cost control: the great advantage over digital advertising. We will only pay when people click on our ad, which guarantees an optimization of the fixed budget.
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Customer acquisition: the summary of all the advantages of the SEM. The biggest advantage of the SEM is that we will increase the number of leads and customers of our website.
SEM Disadvantages
Everything in this life has lights and shadows, and the SEM was not going to be less. Here are the few SEM disadvantages:
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Short-term strategy: in this case, I mean that at the moment when the investment in advertising is reduced, the results will be affected. If you reduce the budget by half, chances are that both your visits and conversions will be reduced by the same percentage.
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Economic spending: we are only going to get results when we invest money in an optimal way than the competition. If you are in a very competitive sector and do not have a lot of money, you will probably only throw the money away.
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Success subject to investment: related to the first point. In this case you have to look at SEO. If we reduce the investment in SEO to 0 it will take a while to lose the positioning, and it is likely that we will maintain it if a great job has been done. In the case of the SEM, this is not the case, if you stop investing, you will stop achieving results.
What tools can help me?
When we talk about SEM, there are two main tools. The operation and the design are practically identical in both, but they have a different behavior.
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Google Ads: the king of internet campaigns. The reason is simple, more than 90% of searches in Spain are made in Google, so that your ad platform is the most demanded. The big advantage of the SEM in this case is the high volume of traffic and conversions that can be achieved. The high cost of the click being the great disadvantage of this tool.
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Bing Ads: the Microsoft ad platform. The design and functionalities are practically identical, being able to even export campaigns from Google Ads. The great advantage of this platform is its CPC, being much lower than Google, while the disadvantage of the SEM that you will have in this case is the low volume of search.
Do I have to do SEM?
Crystal clear,, YES, the SEM will be necessary at all times. If you are starting with a project it is impossible that your organic positioning has taken effect, so if you want to prosper you will have to invest. On the other hand, if your project is already established, you will have to compete against those who advertise at your expense.
There are many SEM advantages and disadvantages, the key to your success will reside in how good you are in maximizing those advantages of the SEM and in minimizing the effect of the disadvantages.
I trust that my article on the advantages and disadvantages of the SEM has been valid for you, if you still do not do it, start investing in digital advertising. It is important that you do not see this as an expense, but as an investment that will boost your business.
See you in the next article!
