By Erik Williams on Aug 21, 2022
What is the difference between SEO and SEM? You will often hear the terms SEO (search engine optimization) and SEM (search engine marketing) used interchangeably.
There is a difference.
When you are communicating with your internal marketing team, marketing consultants or marketing agencies, if you do not understand the difference, this may result in a miscommunication that can point your team down the wrong path and put hurdles in the way of your success.
Put simply,
If you do a bit of research, you are probably going to find references to SEM as encompassing both paid and organic search. But the Internet evolves, and today SEM is generally considered to cover search engine advertising while SEO means organic methods to push search results ideally to the first page of search engines.
Let’s explore this in more detail.
SEO endeavors to improve search engine results organically in a variety of ways. These include technical SEO, on-page SEO, content and backlinks.
You should both build and maintain your website with an eye toward SEO. Important search engine ranking factors in the structure and function of your site include
It’s not enough to just throw any kind of content on your website and add some keywords. Google favors content that offers real value to the reader. Use your content such as blog posts to help support important pages on your website and push your audience to them.
On-page SEO includes all the extra things you do every time you post content. That includes adding metadata such as title tags, meta descriptions to pages and images, and alt text to images that describes what is in the image. It also includes adding not only headings but also subheadings that are correctly indicated with header tags.
If high authority domains link to your site, their credibility with search engines help to raise your site’s credibility – and your site’s search engine rankings. You can build backlinks in many ways. See this article and this article.
Next in discussing the difference between SEO and SEM is to describe SEM in more detail. SEM is essentially paid digital advertising including PPC (pay per click) in order to get more eyeballs in search engine results. Google Ads is one very effective way of doing this. You can buy ads that appear at the top of search engine results. These can be virtually any kind of Internet ads including text search engine ads, display ads, YouTube ads and more.
With SEO you are playing the long game, and you are not going to see results overnight. It can take months before you see much in the way of SEO results. But neither are you paying advertising costs with SEO. Your SEO efforts build on one another, and you see increasing returns over time.
If you need to make a splash quickly such as when you are launching your company or a new product, you will want to supplement your SEO efforts with SEM. Paid advertising will give you much faster results than SEO.
The downside of this is that when you stop advertising, you will immediately lose the search engine visibility that advertising gave you. As we have already pointed out, this is not true with SEO.
With very few exceptions, businesses should use both SEO and SEM in their marketing. Use SEM to get immediate clicks and conversions. Use SEO to build a lasting Internet presence over time.
Both SEO and SEM are going to help your website’s visibility in search engines and drive traffic to your site. For each of these, you need to do keyword research and target your audience.
Although SEM can get you at the top of search engines almost immediately, users are going to see that you have placed a paid ad, because it will be marked as such. That means that most users will not consider these results as credible as organic results. On the other hands, paid ads appear at the top above organic results.
Every time someone clicks on your paid SEM ad, it’s going to cost you if you are using a PPC model.
If you gained search engine placement through organic SEO, on the other hand, it’s not going to cost you a dime (beyond paying your SEO manager).
SEO is a slog. It takes months before you see results.
SEM can produce immediate results
Your cumulative SEO efforts keep on giving for quite awhile. If you hit a slow time and need to reduce or even stop your SEO efforts, you are not going to see an immediate decrease in your search engine visibility.
But if you are running SEM campaigns and stop, all traffic and visibility from those campaigns end when you stop the campaign.
Umbrella Xact experts can analyze your business and recommend a mix of SEO and SEM that will be most effective for your business goals. They can then test, analyze results and refine your campaigns for optimum results.
Contact Umbrella Xact now and get started!
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