SEM is all about blowing up your money, just because you have a budget !

Its a guaranteed hot topic for debate. Deciding what’s good for your company, SEO or SEM, is indeed a confusing question.

In my opinion its least confusing. SEM is merely letting someone blow up your money, because they claimed they do it best, and because you have a budget.

In fact, this question came by when I was doing my initial talks with a client recently. He showed me the quote his first SEO agency gave when approached with a problem of not having visitors to his site.

There was nothing wrong with the quote except the fact that it was 90% SEM and 10% SEO. Before jumping into conclusions, of deciding whether this quote was legit or not, you should think about what the client was. In fact, that’s the most important point.

This client is a small business, and is fairly new. They aren’t even listed on the search engines. In my opinion, they’d need an initial fix, where they build a stable platform for the search engines, from where they can build their content.

They might also need some SEM push once a while, so buy visitors too. But that’s not important at this point if you ask me.

What’s the search engine efforts needed for small businesses that have just started ?

1 – A Stable foundation build on their website structure

2 – Kickass content, that’s open to more volume

3 – A recognizable brand

In my opinion, any small online entity just starting off, badly need to work on their SEO foundation. And that’s what many people miss out. They largely work on the product, usability and functions that its easy to forget about SEO, which might sound silly at that point. But once when the product is launched, if they don’t find the movement as expected, they panic and run to SEOs for traffic.

This is where things gets overly bent, and SEM firms take undue advantage, promising to buy visitors.

The problems of going 100% SEM

Buying visitors for neat prices are cool. In fact, there are wizards who can manage your budget so very well and still give you a lot of mileage. But you cannot completely rely on SEM, especially if you’re a small firm trying to make an impression.

- You don’t have a brand people recall.

- You got to continuously keep spending buying visitors.

- The moment you stop, you fall flat on your face.

- You got to have a huge budget.

- If you don’t get it right, you die trying and lose your face.

If you ask me, a better alternative is to go for a solid organic search engine strategy initially, and once you build your brand as a decently recallable one, go for some extra SEM push. That helps in the long run, because you have an organic search listing you can fall back on, even if you didn’t have a budget, and provided you have a great website with great content, things build up one by one your way.

However, a lot depends on how big you are, what budget you hold and what brand are you. If you’re a big player, obviously with big money to spend, SEM is the way to go, and worry about organic search engine listing later.

But if you have a decent budget, that you want to invest in, build your base and are looking at a long run business, wouldn’t SEO be a better alternative ?

Possibly related SEO & Social Media Articles

• SEO Tips Day 14 – How to submit a new website to search engines ?
  Submitting to search engines, technically means applying for an inclusion to the search index of a search engine. Some SEOs treat this as a service, offering different methods for new websites to get listed on the search engines, but in my opinion this is a very basic necessity every webmaster must go through. Submitting websites to [...]...
• Measuring your ROI on SEO
  It makes sense for someone to look for the ROI when he’s investing money on an SEO project right? When dealing with clients who have a limited budget, one question that they are keen on is – “What ROI would I get investing all this money in SEO?” And I think that’s an interesting question because, in [...]...
• How can you make money from a low traffic blog
  Someone who doesn’t want his name published asked me this question - What are different ways to earn with different type of advertisements for an average blogger, and would like to know what are other sources of income for an average blogger other than advertisements. Average blogger here means who does not have large amount of traffic [...]...
• How will Google find out if you are selling links?
  At the Mumbai Barcamp, while talking to the audience there was a gentleman with a genuine doubt. “Ok, so you tell me that Google will penalize you if you sell links. But how the hell would Google find it out when I’m not talking about it?” Interesting perspective huh? So many of us are scared about the [...]...
• Search Engine Submissions, Paid SEO and Directory submissions – Doesn’t make any sense
  Hey, have you ever checked out those SEO firms claims on the features page? I always make it a point to thoroughly go through all those points mentioned in those sites, particularly the “We do it all” segment.I mean clients too should go through this and let me tell you there are a few things [...]...