SEO vs SEM vs SMM vs SMO

In this digital era almost every entrepreneur has one or more than one digital platforms and all of them are doing marketing of their platforms. They use various types of digital marketing techniques such as SEO, SEM, SMM, SMO, email marketing, PPC campaign, etc. Today I will compare the above techniques SEO vs SEM vs SMM vs SMO so that you can choose the right technique for your business.

Let’s jump into deep:

What is SEO?

SEO means search engine optimization. After doing SEO for your website it will rank higher on SERP. You will get organic traffic to your website.

How to do SEO

SEO is a technical work. Anyone who knows the techniques can do SEO. There are three major steps in SEO; on-page optimization, technical optimization, and off-page optimization. Here are the following steps you have to follow for optimizing your website:

On-Page SEO:

Keywords research
High-quality and informative content creation
Content decoration
URL optimizing
Internal link creation
Optimized Meta description

Technical SEO

Load speed optimization
Mobile friendly website
Image optimization
Create structured data
Create XML sitemap
Connect your website to Google search console

Off-Page SEO

Building traffic funnels with link-building techniques

Benefits of SEO

You can enjoy some extraordinary benefits from SEO that other digital marketing techniques can’t give you. Here are some benefits of SEO for you:

Branding your website.
Getting more traffic.
SEO will make your website more reliable to visitors.
Increase your click ratio.
Better user experience
Impacts on sales
Always being updated
Understand the online environment
Cost-effective marketing strategy
Open the new opportunity

What is SEM?

SEM means search engine marketing. It is paid campaign in the search engines. When we search something in the search engines, it shows us 10 organic results as well as 1-2 paid ad results. These paid search results come from SEM.

How to do SEM

You have to do keywords research first for search engine marketing. High search volume keywords are good for SEM. After keywords research, you have to set up paid campaign data such as target area, target audience, time period, cost per click you want to pay, payment procedure, etc. Search engines will start the ad campaign after completing all the setups.

Benefits of SEM

There are some benefits that only SEM can give you. Here are some SEM benefits I’m sharing

SEM can give you very fast result
Low cost campaign comparing to other digital marketing techniques
It gives organic traffic
If you don’t get any click from the ad campaign, you don’t need to pay money.

What is SMM?

SMM means social media marketing. Social media platforms are the best places for getting traffic for a new website. If you don’t have a lot of social media followers, you may need to promote your business on social media platforms.

How to do SMM

Social media marketing is much easier than other marketing techniques. It can give you the fastest results if you can do SMM properly. Here I’m sharing some tips for doing SMM properly.

First make an eye catching content including banner images.
Now go to your ad account
Set your target audiences, interest of the audiences, age of the audiences, etc
Set your target location
Time period of the ad campaign
Payment procedure

Now you can run the social media ad campaign

Benefits of SMM

SMM is a very good marketing strategy for the newbie. Here I’m sharing some extraordinary benefits of SMM:

Social media marketing can give you very fast result
SMM is very cost effective
Best way to get social traffic and social engagement.
It helps to create your own community.

What is SMO?

SMO means social media optimization. The social media platform is the place where you can get the maximum number of traffic. When you will optimize your social account or pages, you can reach many people without expending money.

How to do SMO

Here I’m sharing some common techniques to optimize your social account.

Create a social page
Provide all information including website URL, contact info and address.
Verify your account
Post regularly to your page
Like and follow others’ pages
Give your valuable comments to others’ post
Share others’ relevant post

Benefits of SMO

There are several benefits you can get from SMO such as

SMO is very low cost
It helps to build your own community
SMO gives you long term results.
It helps to build brand value.

Now let’s see the comparison table of SEO vs SEM vs SMM vs SMO. I hope this table will help you to decide which digital marketing technique you will follow for your business.

SEO	SEM	SMM	SMO
You will get 100% organic traffic from organic search	You will get organic traffic from a paid campaign	Paid traffic from social platforms	Social traffic from social media platforms organically
It takes time to get organic traffic	You will get traffic immediately	You will get immediately social traffic	It will take some extra time compared to SEM and SMM
High sales conversion	Compare to SEO it gets low sales conversion	Compare to SEO, SEM, SMO, it gets low sales conversion	Compare to SMM and SEM it gets better sales conversion
Compare to SEM, SMM, and SMO, it needs high investment	SEM is cheaper than SEO	SMM is cheaper than SEO, SEM	SMO is very cheap
You need to hire an SEO expert for your website	You can do SEM on your own	You can do SMM on your own	You can do SMO on your own
SEO helps to make your business a brand	Compared to SEO it can’t do much	Compared to SEO it can’t do much	SMO also improve brand value
SEO increases the trust flow of a business	It can’t play a vital role to increase trust flow	It can’t play a vital role to increase trust flow	Compared to SEO it can increase a little bit trust flow

SEO vs SEM vs SMM vs SMO

End Words

SEO, SEM, SMM, and SMO all are very powerful digital marketing techniques. All the said techniques can improve your sales as well as online visibility. In this article, I have shared my knowledge and compared the digital marketing techniques SEO vs SEM vs SMM vs SMO. I hope this comparison will help you to make the right decision to do digital marketing for your business.