SEO or SEM? which one to invest in

First of all, SEO and SEM are related to a single channel, which is Google. The initials SE refer to Search Engine, for O it's Optimization, and for M it's Marketing.

It's not that one is better than the other or that you have to choose one over the other or which one suits you better. There will be situations where it might be better to bet more on one than the other depending on the strategy or the goal to be achieved. But at Brand Industry, we always recommend working on both.

Something we have realized over time is that it's not just about investing large budgets in SEM, but rather investing slightly more moderate budgets towards SEM and also working a bit more on SEO.

SEO Rating

SEO is practically a rating given by Google according to different categories placed in more than 70 aspects, all of which relate to traffic, social media connection, mobile optimization, blog, etc., all referring to your website.

On the other hand, SEM

In contrast, SEM is practically a bit more about campaigns.

The advantages that SEM has over SEO include the aspect of segmentation. With SEM, you can segment into demographic, geographic, time-based sectors, keywords, etc. There are many levels of segmentation and targeting of keywords to specific sections of your website. For these reasons, SEM is quite important, especially because the advantage SEM gives you is that with a budget being injected, Google places you immediately among the top positions on the pages according to how well your website is designed and how much you are willing to pay to appear in the top places.

Therefore, Google has many websites willing to pay and be in the top positions. Google, as a lucrative company, decides apart from the budget (the one who pays more will have greater considerations to be in the highest places) by its value proposition, which is that its users/clients find what they are looking for, that the SEO rating is taken too much into account.

So Google makes a very simple equation, multiplying the rating of your website by the budget you are willing to pay. The result is the score where the higher it is, the better position the website will have within Google's search engine.

You can launch a website today and its campaigns approved by Google, and the next day appear among the top positions. Your positioning is instantaneous, but it depends on a budget injection. On the other hand, in the organic part (SEO), you have to feed your website with traffic, content generation, and carry out several SEO strategies to give the website an organic positioning.

It's not one or the other. The idea is to bet on the investment going towards your website and not on Google. The most ideal is to maintain a balance with SEM and bet on your SEO strategy. Commonly, clients want to generate traffic from money invested in Google, which causes strategies to be costly and not obtain organic positioning. So the day the budget is lower or nonexistent, the website simply will not appear in a desired place on Google.

At Brand Industry, we recommend a balance between SEO and SEM and investing money and especially time in the website.