Search Engine Marketing (SEM) vs. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

In a recent meeting a client asked us to clarify the difference between SEM and SEO.

Search Engine Marketing:

Search engine marketing, or SEM, is a form of Internet marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs) through the use of search engine optimization, paid placement, contextual advertising, and paid inclusion. [Souce: Wikipedia]

Search Engine Optimization:

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the "natural" or un-paid ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results. In general, the earlier (or higher on the page), and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. [Souce: Wikipedia]

As you can see from the definitions above, SEO is a component of the larger SEM activity.

SEO – Set it, don’t forget it.

In general, SEO is considered during the development and content creation stages of a web project.  It must also be considered when a web site is re-architected or when new content is deployed.  SEO is primarily concerned with titles, meta tags, html structure and markup as well as  content keyword/phrase density. In the definition above, you see that SEO is concerned with "natural" or un-paid ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results. Since SEO is not concerned with “paid” inclusion in a search engine, the ‘climbing’ of the web site in the organic results can take time. Depending on the target search terms, this process may take days, weeks, months or years. In addition,  SEO requires some ongoing maintenance to ensure  search engine ranking is not lost due to improved SEO efforts by competitors or changing search usage (new vocabularies). Because of this time consuming natural process, and a need for period review, many site owners decide to include SEO  as part of an ongoing SEM marketing plan (and budget).

SEM – You have to  pay to play

Unlike SEO, SEM involves the use of paid search listings like Google Adwords. Many site owners or marketers opt for paid search engine listings as this is the only way to get listed quickly and for a given search term/phrase. The cost usually depend on the terms or phrases you want to be listed under,  and normally involved some sort of bidding process. In most case, you pay “per click” on your link at the rate you have bid.

Both SEO and SEM techniques are drawn towards generating traffic to a website. The biggest difference between SEO and SEM is that SEM is mostly guaranteed and takes place immediately but SEO requires more work, monitoring and patience to yield the desired results.

SEM can be expensive but is generally it is a fast and reliable way of generating traffic  a website.

When done properly, SEM (and SEO) should deliver web site visitors that are interested in the products, services, or content the target web site has to offer, once on the web site, good design and clear calls to action must be in place to convert the visitor into a customer, if the web site is unsuccessful in achieving the goal, the SEO and SEM efforts are wasted.