SEO vs Digital Marketing [2022] – Which Is Better?

Whether you own a small business or large business, growing your business online is not so easy. Wanting to live your dream of lifestyle business, you must know the difference between SEO and Digital Marketing.

There are many benefits of SEO and digital marketing when it comes to running your business. SEO vs digital marketing are always best ways to grow your business and increase sales. But you might be wondering which is better? SEO or digital marketing? The answer is both are equally important.

Those who don’t have much idea about online business, and just started a blog to make money online, must implement SEO to improve their search rankings and implement digital marketing to improve your presence, visibility, authenticity, brand and credibility.

It doesn’t matter you are starting a business or already started a business; you must understand the difference between digital marketing vs SEO.

Well, in this post we will be taking you through the exact SEO & digital marketing difference which will help you to promote your blog to increase traffic to your website.

SEO vs Digital Marketing | Difference Between SEO & Digital Marketing

When it comes to SEO & Digital Marketing (Search Engine Optimization and Digital Marketing), people often mis-understands both the meanings and thinks them as same.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization):

1.    SEO is one of the tools of digital marketing. SEO is part of digital marketing

2.   SEO helps to generate free organic traffic to your website

3.   SEO implementation cost is very low compared to digital marketing

4.   With SEO implementation it is not easy to rank on top of search results as its free

5.   In SEO there is no need to run ad campaigns

6.   Traffic is not limited. It can be as high as possible as long as you’re on top of SERP’s

7.   You need to pay to SEO Specialist to help your website to rank on top of SERP’s

Digital Marketing:

1.    Digital Marketing is not a part of digital marketing. But it owns the SEO tool

2.   Digital Marketing helps to generate paid traffic to your website

3.   Digital Marketing implementation costs are higher compared to SEO

4.   With digital marketing implementation it is easy to rank on top of search results as its paid

5.   In digital marketing you need to run ad campaigns

6.   Traffic is limited. It can be high only until you run ad campaigns to stay on top of SERP’s

7.   You need to pay to Google AdWords or Facebook Ads to stay on top of SERP’s as ad

Many people believe that both are synonyms and are related to each other. Of course, they are related, but they are not the same and both are completely different from each other.

To put it simple words, the SEO and digital marketing are considered to be the best marketing strategies to grow any business. Digital marketing and SEO are most powerful business tactics that you can use and implement to increase sales.

SEO vs Digital Marketing – What is the Difference?

SEO and digital marketing are not the same, both are completely different from each other. SEO is all about increasing traffic to your website. Whereas, digital marketing is all about increasing your company’s visibility, presence, credibility, brand, and value in order to generate more leads and customers.

Thus, the main difference between seo and digital marketing is that, to increase traffic to your website you need SEO and to improve your company’s visibility you need digital marketing strategies.

What is SEO?

What is SEO? And how it is different from digital marketing?

SEO stands for search engine optimization. SEO is that marketing strategy which targets an unpaid traffic rather than targeting paid traffic or direct traffic. Search engine optimization is the best process of improving the quality and quantity of high website traffic to a website by ranking higher among the search engines.

You can say that, the SEO is the part of digital marketing which is one of the most freely available tools that helps to improve the search rankings on google by allowing you to rank higher without any paying money.

The main goal of SEO is to gain more customers and leads there by increasing organic traffic to your website with SEO best practices on google without any pay.

In SEO, you can rank your posts and pages as much as higher among the search engines for a targeted keyword in order to gain more visitors to your website and convert those visitors as your potential future customers.

The SEO strategy involves optimization of your website to give your visitors the best experience that they want by reading your article. The SEO strategy involves implementation of On-page SEO, Off-page SEO, Image SEO, Video SEO, Technical SEO and so on.

Among these, the first and foremost important technic is the On-page SEO which completely focuses on the user experience including optimizing the written content in order to rank on top of SERP’s. This makes it possible for google to crawl your website easily and makes it possible for internet users to find your content.

You must ensure that your website page must be optimized with great quality content that focuses on user experience.

On-Page SEO or On-Page Optimization

The on-page optimization (also called by the name on-page SEO) refers to all content optimization strategies which can be implemented directly within the website or blog in order to improve its ranking position in the search rankings such as google.

The examples of on-page SEO can include strategies to optimize the content or improve the meta description and title tags.

Thus, on-page SEO is one of the must implement SEO practices of optimizing each and every individual web pages and blog posts in order to rank higher on google search consoles so that you can increase the traffic to your website.

Here are few of the On-Page SEO Strategies:

·      Add meta description and title tags

·      Develop user search query intent-based content

·      Add, structure and optimize internal links inside your website

·      Add, structure and optimize external links inside your website

·      Focus and optimize site performance using google page insights

·      Ensure you have optimized canonical URL’s

·      Optimize keyword density

·      Optimize image with your targeted keyword

·      Include robots.txt inside your website

·      Submit sitemap.xml to google search console

Off-Page SEO or Off-Page Optimization

The off-page optimization (also called by the name off-page SEO) is all about link building for SEO, which helps to improve your website or blog post ranking positions on search engines. Off page SEO is one of the long-term and time-consuming process for implementation.

Off-page optimization mainly focuses on acquiring backlinks to your website or blog posts from the authority sites, social media platforms and social bookmarking websites. Off-page SEO factors work in the background which helps to improve the search rankings of your website and blog posts.

Here are few of the Off-Page SEO Strategies:

·      Acquiring links from authority websites

·      Having your presence on social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, and so on

·      Acquiring links from social bookmarking websites

What is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing is the element of internet marketing which utilizes internet and online based digital technologies such as desktop computers, mobile phones and other digital media platforms to promote products and services.

In other words, the digital marketing refers to as an advertising which is delivered through digital channels such as search engines, social media, websites, email, online communities, video platforms and mobile apps.

In simple words, digital marketing is nothing but promoting your business.

Digital marketing is a type of marketing strategy using most of the available digital tools such as social media platforms. The other part of marketing is the strategy of giving value to customers in the form of communication.

The digital marketing is made of the following tools such as,

·      SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

·      SEM (Search Engine Marketing)

·      SMM (Social Media Marketing)

·      Affiliate Marketing

·      Content marketing strategies such as Blogging, Articles, Infographics and Video Creation

·      Email Marketing

·      Mobile Marketing advertisement strategies

·      Online PPC advertising strategies such as pay-per-click advertisement strategies

·      Paid search advertising

·      Marketing automation

·      Paid social media advertising

·      CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization)

·      Native advertising

Assets of Digital Marketing

The asset of digital marketing can be anything. In simple words, anything which comes in your mind that you make use of as a marketing tool online is part of digital marketing. For example, you if you want to become a digital marketer then below are the common assets which you can come across.

Digital Marketing Assets:

·      The Website you own

·      The Branded assets such as your company logo’s, icons, images, acronyms and so on

·      The Video contents that you own such as video ads, product demos and so on

·      The Images you own such as infographics, product images, company photos and so on

·      The Written contents such as your blog posts, ebooks, product reviews, product descriptions, testimonials and so on

·      Your Online Products or Tools such as SaaS, calculators, interactive content and so on

·      Your social media pages

Difference Between SEO and Digital Marketing

So far, we have already understood what is SEO and Digital Marketing. And we have also understood the common difference between the two in brief.

However, to recall it again, the SEO is the part of digital marketing where in you increase organic traffic to your website there by targeting a keyword in order to rank higher among search engines. And the Digital Marketing is the strategy of driving traffic to your website by using paid PPC advertisement strategies such as google ads or facebook ads which in-turn called as paid traffic.

Now, it’s time to clearly understand what is the difference between SEO & Digital Marketing.

1. SEO is Free Organic Traffic and Digital Marketing is Paid Traffic

The main difference between digital marketing and SEO is the way they generate traffic to your website. SEO generates traffic for free and digital marketing generates traffic when you pay.

This means, SEO always focuses on increasing free traffic to your website, when you target a keyword and optimize your content well enough so that the google crawler ranks your website among the top of search results. If your website ranks on the first 3 spots of google search results, then you are more likely to generate high traffic to your website.

SEO is free traffic and anyone can implement to make the most of it. The SEO specialist can able to drive more traffic to his website for free just by implementing all SEO strategies there by optimizing his website.

Digital marketing is the one that completely focuses on paid traffic. This means, in digital marketing you will make use of PPC advertising strategies such as google ads or facebook ads to drive traffic to your website.

Apart from this you can also make use of the other available digital marketing tools to drive more traffic to your website when you have more budget available in your pocket. You can run ad campaigns according to your planned budget and reach millions of people all around the world.

Hence, SEO & Digital Marketing are considered to be best and most effective ways of generating free and paid traffic to your website when implemented strategically.

2. SEO is the Part of Digital Marketing or SEO is the Tool of Digital Marketing

The second difference between SEO and digital marketing is that, the SEO is considered to be a tool of digital marketing, meaning SEO is the part of digital marketing. However, SEO is the first and foremost strategy you must implement on your website before you get going with digital marketing.

Before you get started with digital marketing you must implement SEO in order to optimize your website for search engines to rank higher. This is the foundation for implementation of your future SEO marketing strategies.

3. SEO vs Digital Marketing Cost (Cost of SEO and Cost of Digital Marketing)

The third difference between SEO and digital marketing is the cost of implementation. In simple words, the SEO requires less cost or no cost for implementation. Whereas the Digital Marketing requires higher cost for implementation.

If you are an SEO expert or an SEO specialist you don’t any budget for optimizing your website with SEO.

Cost of SEO Implementations:

The best part of SEO is that you can implement SEO on your own by learning SEO online or over the internet or viewing youtube videos for free which doesn’t require any cost.

But when you don’t have knowledge or not have enough time on SEO implementation then you can hire SEO specialist for whom you need to pay on monthly basis or yearly basis.

The cost of SEO could vary from $50 to $5000 depending on your requirements.

Cost of Digital Marketing Implementations:

The cost of digital marketing could reach as high as possible from $1000 to $10000. The digital marketing is not only limited to just paying to SEO specialist. It could be more than that.

The most of cost involves in the spending your budget on ad campaigns, especially google ads or facebook ads. The more you spend on ad campaigns, the more traffic you are going to get to your website.

As long as you have money and budget, you can run your ad campaign and be on first page of google. But once your budget gets over, you are going to lose the spot on first page and loose the traffic too.

Conclusion

When you think about SEO vs Digital Marketing, you may always get confused by the fact that both are same and are synonyms of for each other. In-fact, the SEO and Digital Marketing are completely different from each other. However, SEO is one of the tools of digital marketing.

SEO helps you optimize your website to be rank high on top of search results, which results in increase of traffic to your website. Whereas the digital marketing helps to drive traffic to your website via pay-per-click advertising strategies. This is the main difference between SEO & Digital Marketing.

SEO helps to increase free organic traffic and Digital Marketing helps to provide more value to customers. Most of the entrepreneurs makes the Digital Marketing as their lifestyle business ideas which you can start too. 

Hope this article has helped you understand the difference between SEO and Digital Marketing.

Please let us know in comments below,

·      What do you think of SEO and Digital Marketing?

·      What is the difference between SEO and Digital Marketing?