What’s the Difference Between SEO and SEM?
The world of search engines is vast and complex, so it’s never a surprise when businesses are riddled with questions. In our experience, one of the most popular pertains to the difference between search engine optimisation and search engine marketing—put more concisely, the difference between SEO and SEM. While they are incredibly distinct and unique, it’s common for the terms to be used interchangeably, especially among novice marketers.
Fret not, however, because we’re here to put things right—this article is going to outline the key differences between SEO and SEM as well as give you an idea of the best ways that each are used to help guide your first steps into the potentially lucrative world of search engine optimisation and marketing.
Ready? Let’s get started.
An Introductory Course in SEO
SEO stands for search engine optimisation—unsurprisingly then, it refers to the process of tweaking your web content to take advantage of the ways that modern search engines crawl through websites. Chiefly, the focus is on improving organic traffic rates, that is, the number of individual people who click through to your website from the search engine results page itself.
The end result may seem fairly simple, but the actual process of optimising your online web content can be infinitely complex. There are a myriad of tactics and strategies that could be applied based on the individual needs of your website and content, but it nevertheless remains a critical component of your online marketing endeavours. Organic traffic is estimated to account for more than half of all traffic, meaning that neglecting its importance severely limits the number of views that get sent your way. Moreover, the process of improving your placements on SERPS comes at no added cost—any improvements to discoverability and traffic at all will ultimately be free.
Search engine optimisation generally falls into three categories. The first—and by far the most common—is known as on-page SEO. This involves the implementation of keywords, structuring of information to create a clear hierarchy, and more. However, there is also off-page SEO. This involves acquiring backlinks to your content from outside sources, something that helps search engines track the authority of your website—the more links that lead to your content for each keyword, the more you’ll be trusted as a subject matter authority, something that plays a big role in the rankings of web pages.
Finally, there is also back-end SEO, which refers to behind-the-scenes changes that you can make to your code to facilitate the crawling of your webpages. Adjusting any meta information, descriptions and tags to improve the speed at which algorithms can crawl through the site itself will go a long way towards building improvements to your SERP rankings.
Regardless of which approach to SEO is most applicable to your needs, the practice is nonetheless critically important to your overall digital marketing strategy.
A Brief Look at SEM
SEM stands for search engine marketing, which is often why it gets confused with SEO—after all, SEO itself is all about marketing, right? Well, the actual relationship between the two tactics is as follows. Search engine marketing is a bigger picture term that comprises within it not only SEO, but also pay-per-click advertisements. Essentially, SEO falls under this wider umbrella category of search engine marketing.
So, since search engine optimisation involves its own set of processes and practices, when people talk about SEM, they’re generally referring to the paid approach, pay-per-click. In contract to SEO, pay-per-click approaches involve bidding on the spaces at the top of SERPs reserved for ad space. On Google, for example, these pay-per-click spots could take anywhere from one to three of the top spots. As its name implies, businesses pay a commission to networks such as Google Ads each time users click on one of these spaces.
While SEM is a paid approach unlike SEO, it can nonetheless be extremely valuable. This is because the increases in visibility are not organic—if your bid is successful, you’ll instantly rocket to the top of the SERP lists, granting your website an extremely prominent spot at the top of the rankings. However, because you’re paying for each click, you still need to ensure that the content and structure of your site is conducive to a positive user experience in order to actually drive conversions. Otherwise, your time—and money—will ultimately be wasted.
Ultimately, SEO and SEM need to be used in tandem in order to derive the greatest results. Slow and steady organic improvements combined with the up-front visibility and prestige that comes with a premium paid SERP slot will give you the greatest likelihood of driving successful leads and conversions. Now that you have a better idea of the relationship and differences between the two practices, the next step is to put them into practice!