In this article you get to know the difference between SEO and SEM.
If you want to get explosive results, then you need to be Google
According to Internet Live Stats, Google gets over 3.5 billion searches every day and almost 1.2 trillion Google searches every year.
Search Engine Optimization(SEO) will give long-term organic traffic to you whereas Search Engine Marketing(SEM) gives you immediate and quick results for a period of time-based on the amount you spent.
SEO or SEM
Digital marketing is all about working together with all digital channels. SEO and SEM are two different sides of digital marketing doing similar work with different approaches.
Knowing when to use the SEO and SEM for business strategy, decides the campaign sours or sinks.
Let’s dive…
What is Search Engine Marketing (SEO)?
Search Engine Marketing helps to increase quality organic website traffic to your website. The main objective of SEO is to rank on the top three results of the first page organically.
The traffic comes from the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) gives the natural traffic cause the user directly enters a keyword in google for a service or product.
So, the quality of traffic is more important than the quantity of traffic to your website for good conversion of visitors into your customers.
Types of SEO
SEO techniques change frequently due to continuous Google algorithm updates.
- On-page SEO
- On-page SEO is all about optimizing a specific page for a single keyword to rank in a search engine. Well you may think good website design attract users but you may not attract search engines like
- Google and Bing to rank your website without proper on-page SEO strategies.
- On-page SEO Strategies include
- Proper Keyword research
- Optimizing page content
- Alt tags for image optimizing
- Meta description and Title optimization
- Header tags
- URL optimizing
- Internal links to website
Technical SEO
Technical SEO is not related to content optimization – It’s about the backend structure of the website. It seems like not relevant but if a search engine identifies any issues in your website it won’t rank your website. Cause the issues may affect user experience search engines notice site mobile friendly to security. If you clear all your technical issues on the website you’ll get an edge on your competitors.
Technical SEO Strategies include
- Mobile-friendly
- Website loading speed
- URL structure
- Sitemap
- Robot.txt
- Page redirects
- Duplicate content
- Structured data
- Website security
Content Marketing
Content marketing is all about focusing on producing quality content to our website based on the keyword research to rank our website. Quality content can increase brand awareness and you can attract google and users across the internet.
Content Marketing Strategies include
- Infographics
- Keyword Research
- Blog posts
- Page optimization
Off-page SEO
Off-page SEO helps to increase the Page Authority and Domain Authority to your website by linking your website to high quality websites.
As you get more links targeting your website, Google believes it as trustworthy and increases visits to your website. As a reward you’ll get organic traffic and high ranking.
Off-page SEO Strategies
- Building backlinks
- List your website in local listings
- Directories
- Forums
- Social book-markings
Above all SEO techniques should focus on three things to satisfy the search engines
Relevance: Search engines look for the content related to your keyword
Authority: Google determine whether the content is accurate or trustworthy
Usefulness: Content on your website should be helpful and useful to the visitor to rank on the website
What is Search Engine Marketing?
Search engine marketing is a strategy to help your site to increase website traffic. SEM includes many paid strategies to appear on the top of the results page for a period of time informing of pay-per-click ads, display ads, search ads and display in google related platforms and websites.
The major difference between SEO and SEM are SEO focuses on organic traffic and other hand SEM focuses on paid traffic.
What components does SEM use?
As mentioned above, SEM deals with paid strategies like pay-per-click advertisements and SMM (social media marketing).
How does SEM work?
SEM gives results based on the bid you fixed to display the ads in the search engine results page. For example you are selling organic products you bid for organic products.
Google ads occupies the lion share and popular advertising platform with 37.2% digital ad market whereas facebook with 19.6%.
You should do keyword research before creating an ad campaign that’s most profitable to your business, service or product.
Then if the user searches for the same keyword, they’ll see your ad at the top or button of the results page.
Every time when the user clicks on the ads, you pay the bid amount.
Difference between SEO and SEM
These are some the difference between SEO and SEM, SEO is a long term goal. It takes months to implement a perfect SEO strategy. It is the easiest way and gives consistent organic traffic without spending a single penny.
SEM puts your ad in front of the audience with just a few clicks. But, you have to pay some amount to display your ad and you see quick results.
- Here in SEM you can test your keywords, audience, ad copy and can see the results immediately.
- SEO is a strategy for a period of time and gives lasting results
- SEM stops showing results when you stop your budget.
- You may not pay when a user clicks on your website in results page
- SEM costs for ads for placing and charge for every click a user clicks on your website ad.
- SEO shows results to all and you can’t choose the audience.
- On the other hand in SEM you can select your audience for displaying your ad.
