What is the difference between SEO and SEM?

Digital Marketing
#1

What is the difference between SEO and SEM?

#2
  • The main difference between SEM vs. SEO is that SEM is a paid strategy and SEO is an organic strategy.
  • Search engine marketing (SEM) is related to SEO in that they both deal with digital marketing outreach on search engines like Google and Bing. However, SEO typically refers to internal, organic website optimization while search engine marketing is commonly known as advertising through a paid media budget.
  • The main difference is that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is focused on optimizing a website in order to get traffic from organic search results. On the other hand, the goal of Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is to get traffic and visibility from both organic and paid search.
  • SEO takes time. Especially if your site is new and doesn’t have a lot of backlinks yet. On the other hand, if you focus your SEM efforts in PPC, you can start to see results pretty much instantly.
#3

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing are two of the most essential factors in Digital Marketing. Most people or even marketers themselves use these terminologies for their products or services. Both SEO and SEM can help you to build stronger online visibility. They both are equally powerful techniques, it is best to consider major factors such as your goals, your needs, and your budget.

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is a search marketing process that uses organic, unpaid tactics to maximize the number of visitors to a website in search engine result pages(SERPs). Because of the organic approach, SEO is much cheaper than SEM, it is in terms of the techniques used, SEO also comes with a price. It is slow to change the result. The performance of SEO depends on the structure of your website, valuable and relevant content of the website. The more people are linked to your site, the more results you get. SEO results can change a number of times, depending upon whether there is a change in the core algorithm by Google. It is very predictable and at the same time unpredictable. SEO is a cumulative process. From a marketer’s lens, SEO should be treated as a long-term strategy but it has to be used in conjugation to the SEM strategy of a brand.

Search Engine Marketing(SEM) is a marketing tactic that involves paid advertisements to earn search visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs). It can start running immediately. It depends on a higher click-through rate (CTR), how good landing pages are, and how much you pay (your budget & your bidding strategy). Results of paid campaigns are very predictable. It is a chart-based system on how much you are paid and how many calls you get / how many website visits you get, how many leads fills you get.

SEM should be treated as a strategy that gives instant results, high volume of traffic to your website and the traffic falls if the SEM paid campaign stops spending.