You may often wonder, “What is the difference between SEO and SEM?” The difference between SEO and SEM is simple. SEO or search engine optimization is the practice of optimizing content to be discovered through a search engine’s organic results. SEM or search engine marketing is traditionally SEO plus pay-per-click advertising, but some people just look at it as PPC today.
Now, you might be thinking that SEO is the way to go since organic traffic is free, consistent and passive. But, it would be short-sighted to think that it will be the only way to grow your business through search. In this article we will be discussing them both and when/where you should be using SEO, PPC or both. So, let’s get started.
What are SEO and SEM in digital marketing?
Around 5 billion searches happen on Google every single day. It’s also been reported that search engines drive 10 times more traffic to shopping sites than social media. From a pure SEO perspective, you need to remember that search engines are businesses. They need to make money in order to operate. As a result, most, if not all platforms will give premium placements to paying customers. For example, commercial keywords like “insurance” have a ton of value and therefore, a ton of competition. So, the entire fold is covered with ads, making organic results almost invisible.
Google doesn’t show ads on every page for every search. There needs to be some sort of commercial intent in order for ads to appear. So, if you were to opt-in for an infinite ads budget but no SEO services, you would be missing out on a ton of opportunity to get traffic. Commercial keywords generally have less search volume than informational ones, which would even further limit your pool of relevant traffic. This is why we have another acronym, SEM, where we can combine the two strategies and truly take our search engine marketing to another level.
Is SEO a part of SEM?
There are likely keywords in your industry that you won’t be able to rank for in years. Now, that doesn’t mean you should abandon SEO and just run ads. But, since ranking for competitive terms will be a long play, PPC can help get the ball rolling immediately. By using PPC while you are working on SEO, you will immediately generate revenue since you are paying for traffic and you get an opportunity to test and optimize for conversions. Most ad platforms have conversion-tracking features. Use this as an opportunity to get information on things like average cost per conversion. Lastly, you can get valuable keyword data. This will give you an idea of whether the keywords you want to target will actually produce conversions.
Another reason you might want to use both SEO and PPC is if the search result pages are covered in ads (as mentioned before with the “insurance” example). Even if you are ranking #1 through SEO, the organic results are so far down that they may not even get clicked.
These days a typical SERP will have some ads at the top, some SERP elements like featured snippets, “people also ask” boxes and then the organic search results. Now, this might feel annoying for SEOs in particular; look at this as an opportunity to rank in SERPs with monopolization in mind.
The way you should look at the topic of SEO and PPC is not so much “which one should you use?” It’s more about looking at the differences and how they complement each other in creating a dominant search engine marketing strategy.
