SEO and SEM Insight: Competition or Collaboration?

By mastering SEO and PPC, a marketer will be able to follow the development of the dynamic search landscape.

“If your business is not on the internet, then your business will be out of business.” Whether you agree or not, the prediction of technology tycoon and founder of Microsoft, Bill Gates, has now become a reality.

The mighty power of the Internet has indeed changed many things, including our habits and lifestyle. It has become the center of modern human interaction and activity. Based on data from Hootsuite and We Are Social, internet users in the world in 2018 have reached more than 4 billion people.

That number grew by 7% compared to 2017. In Indonesia, more than 1% of the economy happens in Tokopedia through the Internet, and we hope that in upcoming years this number will grow to 5%.

For the last 10 years, Tokopedia has been democratizing Indonesia’s economy through Internet and has already reached 97% of districts in Indonesia.

One of the epicenters of the activity on the Internet is in the search engine. In the search engine business, Google is the ruler. Although there has never been an official release, marketers believe that more than 90% of searches in cyberspace come from Google.

Search activities through Google also vary, ranging from questions about weather forecasts, the latest news to product recommendations. From this fact, it can be concluded that the Internet and search engines have become the eyes and ears of consumers to find the products they need.

As the changing habits of consumers who are now more comfortable doing transactions online, marketing has shifted from offline to online. This is where digital marketing as a discipline is born. Automatically, the methods, approaches and activities of marketers also change following these changes.

SEO & PPC in Digital Marketing

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is one of the strategies in digital marketing that aims to increase visitors to a website. The term SEM was initially used to describe SEO and PPC (Pay per Click) marketing. However, now the term is more often used to refer to PPC activity.

However, people who are not familiar are often confused to distinguish the two. SEO and PPC marketing are easily distinguished from the type of traffic that is brought in. If it comes from SEO, then the traffic will be counted as organic, while PPC is paid.

As a technology company that continues to build its super ecosystem, Tokopedia has been running SEO and SEM activities since it was first established. To get a more comprehensive understanding, let’s review it from the point of view of Tokopedia marketers.

Muhammad Rizqi Riandra, SEO Specialist of Tokopedia, explained that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a series of activities aimed at increasing the visibility and searchability of websites in a search engine.

“For me, SEO is the art of making a website page that has high visibility on search engines and also makes the website useful for users.

So how does SEO team implement SEO on Tokopedia? The man who is more familiarly called Eki explained in a number of stages namely: Increasing crawl accessibility so that search engine robots can access websites easily, increase website speed and create a user-friendly interface, create content that answers user questions and optimize keywords so that websites are easy to find by the search engine and humans. “To simplify, the more our website has relevance according to the topics and keywords we have, that’s where SEO works.”

“The more our website has relevance according to the topics and keywords we have, that’s where SEO works.”

Almost the same as SEO, PPC marketing also aims to help business websites get high visibility on search engines. However, it is done through paid keyword-based promotions.

According to Febriana Diah Permatasari, SEM Specialist of Tokopedia, a PPC marketer is required to use the existing budget intelligently and ensure that every click comes from a user who wants to convert. “With PPC, marketers hope to influence the audience to do something on our website,” she continued.

Febriana added, the application of PPC is not much different than SEO, in addition to having to do keyword research and make good copy, we must first make sure the web page is relevant to user needs.

“For SEM to work well is a combination of relevant keywords, relevant ads, good landing pages and bidding.”

Organic CTR Declining Trends and How SEO-PPC Collaborates

A data released by SparkToro’s company founded by an American digital marketer, Rand Fishkin, revealed a declining trend in organic Click-Through Rates (CTRs) on Google Search in the US and Europe, and the phenomenon of increasing paid CTR at the same time. From the data collected between 2016 and 2018, many people predict that the future of search is on PPC.

So, should SEO be abandoned by marketers? According to Febriana, the effectiveness of PPC marketing does not necessarily negate SEO. SEO and PPC marketing can collaborate to achieve better results. The existence of PPC ads when collaborating with organic results done by SEO will make a website dominate SERP and increase the potential for users to click through ads. PPC is also able to build brand awareness that will have a positive impact on organic listings.

“The effectiveness of PPC marketing does not necessarily negate SEO. In fact, SEO and PPC marketing can collaborate to achieve better results”.

She explained how the collaboration between SEO and SEM have had a good result. “SEM keywords helps SEO build traffic with specific targets. This affects the sustainability of the keywords used by SEO. In addition, the use of keywords in both of them equals more exposure.”

Meanwhile, Eki also said how SEO and PPC have worked together in many ways, including in finding and defining quality keywords for PPC and SEO campaigns. He went on to explain that SEO and PPC marketing work together by using specific keywords for a campaign.

Imagine SEM as the “anglers” for people who don’t know the campaign and SEO as the “reservoir” for people who already know the campaign and searching for it on the search engine. In addition, SEO & SEM also work together to find out which keywords have natural impressions (from SEO) and high-quality keywords based on CPC (from SEM).

In addition to collaborating, Tokopedia’s Internet Marketing team can also learn from one another. Digital marketers believe that by mastering SEO and PPC, a marketer will be able to follow the development of the dynamic search landscape, while at the same time finding and connecting businesses with users.

For an SEO Specialist like Eki, studying SEM / PPC marketing will help him find quality keywords in business value.

English editor: Namira Faza Komal