Until the advent of the highly proliferated internet and social media usage, high impact advertising and related marketing were only relegated to massive companies. Small and medium enterprises (SMEs), were relegated to small-scale and limited impact marketing strategies such as gorilla marketing and local station marketing (Fahlström & Jensen, 2016). The internet has, in the recent past created a fair chance for SMEs with their limited pecuniary capabilities to have massive advertising campaigns with a national or even global impact. Search-engine optimization (SEO) and Search engine marketing (SEM) are among the tools used by SMEs to increase the impact of social media marketing (Fahlström & Jensen, 2016). Due to the high prevalence of internet searches by consumers, SEM and SEO are great marketing avenues for any marketer but SEO is more suitable for an SME than SEM.
SEO entails the use of information technology capabilities to keep a product popular enough to be highly visible online thus acting as a marketing tool (Fahlström & Jensen, 2016). For example, a random search for laptop vendors on the Google search engine will normally produce millions of responses but only less than five will be visible on the screen on the device being used for the search. Majority of people will focus on the five or the other five lower than those in the search. Very few people will go hunting for the 50 th item in the search engine, let alone 500 th . SEO marketing seeks to ensure that the product being marketed is within the very first items within a specific search by ensuring that the product is the subject of a high number of online discussion (Li et al., 2014). Conversely, SEM uses the same concept of seeking for visibility on search engines through rigging the system so that a company’s information will always top the list. Among the primary sources of revenues for bloggers is SEO while search engine companies use SEM as a source of revenue.
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The two primary characteristics of marketing for an SME is a limitation of funds and the need to relate with the consumer. The SME may not have millions of dollars to spend on advertising hence its most effective advertising tool is to endear itself to the target market as being small enough to care (Fahlström & Jensen, 2016). It is these two characteristics of the SME that give SEO an edge over SEM. For a start, the SEM will be exponentially more expensive than the SEO since the advertiser has to pay the search engine company itself. Most search engine companies are multinationals such as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft hence advertising fees are high. SEO can be attained by hiring a number of cheap bloggers who may even include an SME’s employees (Li et al., 2014). Secondly, the SEM advert clearly reflects in the search engine that it has been paid for hence every consumer will know that the information contained is not impartial. It is easier for a consumer to believe information that has been posted about a product by a seeming third party as in the SEO (Fahlström & Jensen, 2016).
From the totality of the above, it is clear that the internet is a good source of relatively cheap but highly effective advertising. Among the tools for this advertising is the SEO and the SEM. SEO increases the propensity for a product being found when an online search is made. On the other hand, SEM ensures that when a related search is made, a product is placed at the top of the search list with an indication that the item has been sponsored. Due to the unique nature of the SME due to inter alia limited funds and the need for a relationship with the customer, the SEO is more suitable and effective than the SEM.
References
Fahlström, K., & Jensen, C. (2016). Search engine marketing in SMEs: The motivations behind using search engine marketing.
Li, K., Lin, M., Lin, Z., & Xing, B. (2014, January). Running and chasing--the competition between paid search marketing and search engine optimization. In System Sciences (HICSS), 2014 47th Hawaii International Conference on (pp. 3110-3119). IEEE
