SEO vs. SEM: What’s the difference?

Two different terms, two different meanings, and two different services, but they still produce the same outcome for you. SEO and SEM are all about making your website more visible on the web. So, what is the difference between these two terms, besides the change in a letter at the end?

What is SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimization and is a marketing discipline which focusses on affecting the visibility of a website in unpaid search engine results. These can often be referred to as natural, organic or earned results because you haven’t paid for your spot on the search engine.

So, why does your website need it?

As of 2018, the internet has been estimated to have over 1.5 billion websites, 200 million of which are active. Therefore, you can’t just rely on the odd chance that someone will find your website. There will lots of businesses like yours that you are competing with online around the world and if your site doesn’t show up until the fourth results page on the search engine, you are losing potential customers. Most users of the internet don’t venture past the first two pages, so this ideally is where you want to be.

Without SEO, the search engine will struggle to find you, and therefore you are missing out on big opportunities for your business, but with SEO you could potentially gain thousands of customers and visitors.

What do they do?

SEO is typically a white hat best practice, and experts look for many different things; it can be as simple as making your site structured in the way a search engine, such as Google, can understand or it can be about getting more traffic to your website.

If it is the structure that is a priority, SEO will use a technique called On-Page optimization which looks at how well your content is presented to search engines and if it is structured in a manner that will mean it will get found by them too. They can improve the overall readability of the site which in itself will drive more visitors if the website works well.

By choosing SEO, your website will have earned itself a free spot in the search results by having the most relevant content for a given keywordKeywords are the words and phrases that potential customers might search for to find your business. search.

What is SEM?

SEM stands for search engine marketing; and is also about marketing the visibility of websites in search engine results and will often incorporate SEO techniques.

It is an effective way to promote your products and grow your business, but unlike SEO, SEM is about buying traffic through paid search listings by purchasing adverts on search engines.  These adverts will appear on search engines promoting your website which means you can reach more people and will become more visible a lot faster.

It will successfully target specific people and will ultimately result in traffic being sent to your website.

SEM is an effective way to promote your business and products. They offer:

• Paid search ads
• Paid search advertisements
• PPC – pay per click
• CPC – cost per click
• CPMCPM, or Cost Per Mille, is an important metric for online advertisers. Use it to work out the ROI of your projects and to hone your marketing prowess. – cost per thousand impressions

What is important to remember about SEM is that you need to create an advert that will not just get your views on your website, but sales too.

Use social media to your advantage

Since the age of social media, the world of SEO has changed. You can do a lot more outside of your website to promote it, including, social media promotion, forum submissions, social bookmarkingSocial bookmarking sites, such as Reddit and Pinterest, can help boost a website’s traffic and profile. Here’s how to engage with them so that you’re always on-trend and in step with your audience. sites, guest posts, infographics, and video marketing all of which are free to you.

There are lots of other ways that you can drive traffic to your website via paid marketing too, such as Facebook ads. This will mean you can reach an even wider audience if you must, and you can do this with SEM.

How do search engines work?

As aforementioned, your website will be found using search engines. There are three major commercial search engines:

• Google
• Bing
• Yahoo

Their two major functions are crawling and building an index and providing search users with a ranked list of websites they’ve determined to be the most relevant, which is why keywords and phrases are so important as this is what search engines will look for. Google ad words are the most popular paid search platform used by SEM, followed by Bing and then Yahoo. It will display your advert very clearly at the top or the right side of the search results page.

SEO VS. SEM. Which is better?

So, which one is better? It’s important for any owner of a website to know about these terms so you can come to the understanding of how it exactly helps your business.

People would argue that SEO is the best approach, as true SEM cannot succeed without the use of organic SEO. But an important factor to mention is that they are not competing for services – SEO is considered a subset of SEM services. Therefore, you’ve got to pick which one will benefit you the most.

While it may take longer to see any results by using SEO, it is good to think about what your website is promoting. Are you selling products or is it a blog? If it is the latter, you will want to remember that a blog will not make you back your money. Whereas if you’re selling products, it might be worth considering doing SEM to get sales a lot faster.

Regardless of whether you prefer the practices of SEM, you should also consider applying SEO. If you want to be visible on the web you need to be visible in both organic and advertised linksHyperlinks, also known as links, are the connection points on a webpage that take you to other webpages. – small businesses might need both SEO AND SEM. If you have any queries or questions on SEO vs. SEM and about making your website more visible then do not hesitate to contact us at Click Intelligence for more information. Our team are more than happy to ready to help boost your online visibility.