What are the benefits and drawbacks of a search marketing?

What are the benefits and drawbacks of a search marketing?

Search marketing is the methodology of increasing traffic and visibility from search engines, be it from paid and unpaid efforts. Paid efforts will be Search engine marketing (SEM) that we are buying traffic through paid ads. Unpaid efforts will be Search engine optimisation (SEO) that we have gained traffic through organic.

Benefits of SEO

One of the biggest benefits of SEO will be that it is rather cost-effective as there is no payment to the search engines for your website to be showing at the organic search.  As the ranking of the organic usually base on the search algorithm or relevancy of the website contents.

Secondly, it is more credible, 70% of most people will choose to click on the organic than the paid ads. The users trust organic results more than paid ads.

Disadvantages of SEO

The difficulties that SEO may face will be lack of control due to the rapid change in the search algorithm or even the changes in the policy of the search browsers may affect the ranking.

Another problem will be lots of competition that will be going through not just locally and as well as international. There will be big pool of companies to fight against to be top in the rank. Beside that if the competitors often update their relevancy of the website contents, it may increase in their ranking as well.

Lastly, 75% of the users will tend not to scroll passed the first page of search results. Thus, if the ranking landed on page 2 and below, most of the users will miss it or don’t even know the business existed.

Benefits of SEM

One of the benefit of SEM will be that it is more targeted and accuracy of the searching due to the keywords that they imply in.

SEM will have more control over the ranking. The position of the ranking is able to modify on the real time basis, as such if the ranking has drop, we are able to bid for higher price to push the ranking back to the top.

The effect of earning traffic through SEM will be instant; you are able to set up the campaign instantly and get placements that you have paid for.

Disadvantages of SEM

Biggest fear of SEM will be missing opportunity due to the 70% of the users do not click on it, thus not to able to fully maximise the effect.

SEM tends to be more costly and fluctuate more often, due to the bidding wars that occur between the competitors. If the competitors have bigger budgets, they are able to increase the bidding rate to dominate the top ranking making the bidding rate much higher.