Are SEM and SEO both essential for small business?

Before you understand how SEM and SEO help with small business promotion, I am going to start with the very basics. Let’s see the most common definitions for both of them.

First of all, the Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is also known as the Paid Search for being the core component in the online presence of practically every modern business project. SEM often includes the PPC advertising displayed directly among the list of the search engine result pages (the SERPs), as well as the rest of paid ads, which appear elsewhere on different other web pages for retargeting. And it works at ease - there is no set price for advertising period, as each time your ad receives a click from the live user is all you need to pay for.

The second important practice is the Search Engine Optimization (SEO), which covers a comprehensive set of actions to get a higher organic page ranking in the SERPs. Most commonly, SEO gives help for small business ranking promotion via primary on-site works (such as content and metadata improvement), and off-site tasks mainly related to quality link building process. In fact, here you can’t have any paid growth to boost your organic rankings. Of course, requesting a professional SEO help for small business promotion, or any other online project disregarding its size, is commonly charged by the agency according to the scale of works needed in each case.

So, let’s get back to the main point. And I am going to make everything clear at once - both SEM and SEO are now the subjects of top importance for every website’s commercial success. Both of them are needed to improve the online visibility of the business, bringing it on top search results and putting the company in front of a wider target audience. That way, more potential customers are likely to see the suggestion given by Google (or Bing as well) and proceed with paying a visit to the website of your business.

Of course, both the Search Engine Marketing and the Search Engine Optimization are needed for the best-ranking progress, each of them will show its strongest sides during different phases of your hard journey to success. But in this short answer, I would like to pay more attention particularly in what way SEO can help for small business. 

First of all, you can find the search optimization services entirely affordable under any circumstances, they can be tailored to nearly any marketing budget. After all, you might as well do a lot of basic SEO work by yourself. All you need to handle a proper DIY search optimization delivering actual results is to have a complete website, without paying a cent (unlike SEM). Just be ready to invest some time to get enough knowledge needed for improving your page content, building better internal linking, optimizing your page load speed, etc. Even with a zero marketing budget, you are free to boost your ranking with SEO, particularly in local search results, and get better chances to visited by the right people.