SEO Vs SEM: What Is The Best Investment For Your Medical Center?

When it comes to increasing visits to our healthcare website or online store, there are two ways to obtain them: SEO and SEM. If you are not yet familiar with both techniques, you may wonder: which is the most beneficial for my health care center or clinic? What are the disadvantages of each one? Therefore, in this article, we are going to explain, in a basic and simple way, what you need to know about each one. We will see their points in favor, points against, and we will tell you which one you should choose to increase the sales of your healthcare business.

What is SEO Web Positioning? 

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a digital marketing technique focused on improving the visibility of a website, be it a blog or e-commerce in an organic or natural way. 

Its objective is to ensure that a page appears in the highest positions of the search results, at the moment a user enters the search engine, phrases or specific words in the search engine, related to the sector or theme of the web.

These words are known as keywords, which are previously selected by the SEO expert or agency in charge of the website. 

SEO benefits for your healthcare center

Promote your website without rest: As if it were a store that never closes, SEO makes sure that users find you 24/7.

Active results: Once you manage to position your healthcare website on the first page of Google and with a minimum of maintenance, it will receive frequent traffic and visits. A single content positioned can generate 10,000 visits per month and become customers.

An immediate sense of trust: Users see the pages in the first results as reliable sources of information. Well, they think that "for something" Google shows them certain pages in the first position.

Increase engagement: SEO works for hand in hand with Content Marketing, a strategy that offers free and valuable content.  

It is more profitable in the long term: Since you do not have to constantly occupy paid ad campaigns for each product, service, landing page or theme to be promoted on your website.

Disadvantages

Medium and long-term results: If you want results in the blink of an eye, think it over with SEO.

What is SEM?

The SEM, for its part, is an acronym that corresponds to Search Engine Marketing and is a positioning technique based on implementing paid search engine advertising. With it, your website, blog, or online store will stand out at the top of the search engines under the labels of ''Ads" or ''promoted links''.

To use an SEM campaign, the Google ADS platform is generally used, which consists of bidding for keywords or specific keywords. Of course, the more competition there is for a particular keyword, the higher the advertising price to pay. To get good results, it is recommended to hire medical ad agency to do this, Otherwise, you may run out of money before you get good results.

SEM ads can have different goals: increase web traffic, reach, conversions, or business purposes like selling a certain product or service. And they are segmented so that they can only be seen by people who carry out searches related to the sector. 

SEM benefits

Immediate results: As soon as you run an SEM ad, your website will appear in the first positions. 

The rapid increase in traffic: You will be able to increase the traffic of your site in a short time. 

Personalized budget: You can adjust and control the daily investment and the maximum budget to spend on the campaign.

Dynamic and flexible: You can modify any aspect of your campaign at any time: targeting, change ads, or increase/decrease ad or budget bids.

You gain brand recognition: If your website or business is new and you don't have clients, SEM is a good strategy to gain recognition quickly.

Disadvantages

More expensive in the long run.

When the campaign comes to an end you will quickly lose your position.

New advertisers may appear, with greater investment capacity, who displace than displace your ad. Therefore, you will have to pay more to get your position back.

So... which one should I choose?

We would be lying to you if we said that SEO is better than SEM.

We would also be speaking fallacies if we affirm that SEM is better than SEO.

Ideally, you should combine both positioning strategies to obtain complete results in the short and long term. Both SEO and SEM offer benefits that cover needs such as increasing sales, gaining recognition, and standing out from the competition. In addition, it is always better to diversify our techniques of attracting traffic and not depend on just one.