Should I SEM or Should I SEO?

How do paid search marketing and search engine optimization interlock? When should marketers opt to pay for placement on a search page, and when should they spend their resources on making their existing Web sites more readable to search engine “spiders”? What kind of results can each one produce?

Peter Hershberg, a managing partner at Reprise Media, says time and technology are determining factors in choosing between search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimization (SEO), which aims to make Web pages more attractive to the indexing bots used by the major search engines—what’s known as “organic search”. He offers a few rules of thumb to guide marketing decision-makers in their quest for new business on the Web:

* For immediate results, go with SEM. It can take four to eight weeks to optimize a site and then another six to eight weeks to see the improved click results. On the other hand, a paid-search campaign can literally be up and producing in 15 minutes, making SEM the choice when clients are running a time-sensitive promotion.

* Search engines don’t “read” pages built with certain types of content when building their index. A page that contains Flash technology, for example, will not register, nor will one with dynamic or rapidly revised content generated from a changing database. While SEO will permit some format changes, those revisions will alter the presentation. SEM allows marketers to feed those Flash or dynamic pages directly to the engines in a format they can read, making sure they reach the eyeballs they’re targeting with the pizzazz intact.

* To keep a handle on ongoing marketing costs, SEO is the proper choice. Partly because it produces swift results, effective SEM is a continuous cycle of implementation, measurement and adaptation, so the associated costs can trail on long after an SEM campaign is launched. And under the terms of paid search, the more clicks you get, the more you spend. On the other hand, costs for SEO—admittedly steep at the outset—are front-loaded. Once Web pages are optimized for organic search, the low ongoing maintenance fees and avoidance of the cost-per-click model make it cost-efficient for marketers on a limited budget.

* Since SEM is tied to performance, marketers who use it can set cost-per-acquisition metrics and then design a campaign to meet them. Costs are controlled by the marketer, who can spend as much or as little on paid search as the current budget will allow. SEO results are very much at the mercy of the search engines and thus not as liable to give the same control over costs per new customer.

* Big-brand marketers may opt for SEM to make sure they retain keywords that relate to their brands and trademarks, which the big pay-per-click engines are now allowing competitors to buy. Of course, SEM also can be used to stake a claim to that valuable real estate on the first search page; every slot you occupy is one that’s not available to your market rivals.

In the end, says Hershberg, SEM and SEO can dovetail nicely if done thoughtfully and with a focus on the most efficient use of marketing dollars. “At the end of the day, any successful search campaign should at least give consideration to both sides of the house,” he says. “Work that you do in the paid-search area should complement what you’re seeing right now in your organic search results.”

In fact, SEM can feed smoothly into a later SEO campaign. “Given the immediacy and the flexibility of paid search, we can take a look at which keywords turn out to be most profitable within an SEM campaign and then turn around and optimize a client’s site around those keywords,” he says. “So paid search can be a testing ground for work in SEO. You can make sure these clicks will acquire the right targeted customers before you go down the road of taking weeks and months to optimize a Web site and see the results.”