Difference between SEO and SEM [Industry Stats]

Today, millions of people use the internet regularly for searching, which increases the demand for search engine strategies for marketers to enhance their content’s visibility on search engines. SEO and SEM are two popular techniques companies use for growing sales and revenue, but with different approaches. There is a key difference between Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM). SEO helps boost your organic search ranking, whereas SEM harnesses both organic search and paid advertising to increase website traffic.

When you are thinking of using the right strategy for increasing the visibility and sales of your business, you must understand the major differences between SEO and SEM. So, let’s get started:

1. What is Search Engine Optimization?

It is the process of optimizing a website to boost its visibility organically (unpaid) on major search engines. Google and Bing rely on algorithms to ensure their search engines come up with high-quality and relevant search results for user’s queries. This is why marketers implement SEO strategies to ensure the algorithms rank their content in their favor. The main objective of Search Engine Optimization is to enhance the ranking of a website organically and make it reach the first page of the SERP or Search Engine Results Page for a specific phrase or keyword.

There is a popular saying by Matt Cutts, “Rather than scrolling down the page past a slew of ads, users want to see content right away.” So, to give users what they want right away is just using the SEO strategy for higher rankings in SERPs.

There are 4 main steps involved in SEO:

• Keyword research: It is about finding what users are searching for. Understanding the words or phrases users type into search engines is the key to finding the right keywords. 94.74 percent of keywords get ten monthly searches or fewer. There are different keyword research tools you can use like Google Ads Keyword Planner.

   

• On-Page SEO: It is about creating the content that searchers are exploring. After researching the keywords, the next thing is to craft the content according to the keywords. It includes keyword optimization, content quality, Meta tags, and internal linking.

   

• Off-page SEO: It involves doing things outside your website to show Google that your web pages deserve to rank in search engines. 75 percent of SEO is off-page and 25 percent is on-page. It helps in building trust and authority from other sites. It includes social media signals, backlinks, and other external factors that affect ranking.

   

• Technical SEO: It ensures search engines discover, crawl, and index your content. Technical SEO helps in enhancing site performance and making it mobile-friendly. Moreover, it also makes sure search engines can crawl and index the website effectively.

You Should Also Read this Blog : How To Do SEO For YouTube In 2024

2. What is Pay-per-click?

It is a type of advertising and you need to pay for site clicks from different popular platforms. If you use SEM, you need to pay from search engines such as Google. PPC advertising in Google contains keyword research, bid setting, ad creation, and audience targeting.

• When it comes to keyword research for Google Ads, it is not only about discovering what customers are looking for. In fact, it is also about researching how much advertisements are likely to cost and the ad cost varies according to keywords.

   

• Bid setting is the process where you decide how much money you are interested in paying Google for an ad click. In case, your competitors overpay you and have relevant equal ads, then Google would not display your ad much and you will be deprived of many clicks as well.

   

• Advertisement creation is the process where you decide what your advertisement will say and where it will navigate people. Ensure you know that ads with high Quality Scores that are given by Google are viewed by lots of people and they pay less for ad clicks.

   

• Next, in audience targeting, you need to decide who should view your ad. It means that a specific audience must be targeted. You can target people according to who they are, where they are, what they want to see, etc.

The traffic you get after using PPC tends to convert 50% better than organic site visitors.

3. What is Search Engine Marketing?

Rand Fishkin says, “SEM is not about getting more traffic to your website. It’s about getting the right kind of traffic.”

SEM or Search Engine Marketing is the form of marketing, in which you attract traffic to your website from search engines. When you use SEM, you can attract this traffic from paid or organic results or both. SEM is all about paid advertising on search engines. Paid search ads are used to appear at the top of SERPs. Using SEO will help you get traffic from organic results and PPC to drive traffic from paid results. In simple words, we can say both PPC and SEO are types of Search Engine Marketing.

4. Learn 3 key differences between SEM and SEO

Both SEO and SEM are advertising techniques to generate web traffic and are used by marketers and companies. Before choosing any of them as a marketing strategy, ensure you know their key differences including the types of search results a particular marketing strategy targets, the amount of time it takes to generate results, and its overall costs. So, read further to understand the major differences between SEM and SEO:

• Targeting different search results

Both SEM and SEO have the same principal goal to achieve, which is to boost the visibility of an organization on search engines. A major fact you should know is that they each aim in different ways to achieve that same goal. Talking about Search Engine Optimization, it emphasizes the creation and improvement of webpages to increase their rankings in organic search results, but SEM emphasizes the use of paid ads to increase the rankings in SERPs.

In SEO, marketers create content that is favorable to search engine algorithms. Even though there is no detailed information about how Google and Bing rank pages, algorithms use many factors to rank websites such as title tags, content quality, site speed, backlinking, and mobile friendliness.

• Title tag: The title of the page should include the main keyword of the content. If not the main keyword, you can use at least a variation of it.
• Mobile friendliness: Search engines emphasize more on those sites that fit in mobile browsers because today, more people use mobiles for searching.
• Content quality: The type of content you post on a website must be well-written, well-organized, and unique content.
• Backlinking: Websites with a number of backlinks—links from external sites attract more traffic and rank higher in SERPs. Backlinks account for 30 percent of your page score on Google.
• Site speed: Search engines prioritize those sites that can load quickly rather than slow pages.

These are important elements of an SEO strategy when it comes to creating digital content. If you take care of all these things, your site will reach the first position or first page on Google for phrases or keywords they have used without investing in them.

When we talk about SEM, marketers depend on paid ads to appear at the top of SERPs automatically for phrases and keywords relevant to their content. Search ads and shopping ads are two important types of SEM advertising.

• Search advertisements: You can bid on a phrase or keyword, which gives you a link to your page appearing on SERPs accordingly. Such ads rely on a PPC model, where users pay a fee for every time someone clicks on the ad.
• Shopping advertisements: These ads are also dependent on the PPC model along with Google Shopping to link to the e-commerce product page of the company. You will find an image of the product combined with the product price and title in these ads.

When people type into search engines for products and keywords, they may see ads for relevant products and pages. It is clear that SEM ads provide marketers with an easy and quick way to increase the visibility of their brand, products, and content among the target audiences.

• Time taken to deliver results

It is another factor that lets you understand the difference between SEM and SEO. SEO takes more time to show results than SEM. If you use an SEO strategy, you may need three months to 2 years to see significant improvements in rankings, whereas, in the case of SEM, you can see results in increased web traffic just within hours. Due to the high competition in the digital marketing industry, companies should build a comprehensive library of unique and high-quality content, accumulate backlinks from external websites, and ensure a positive UX for visitors. Of course, all of these things need time.

On the other side, Search Engine Marketing tends to produce traffic immediately once your marketing team launches an SEM campaign on a platform such as Google Ads. However, make sure you research the target audience and create high-quality landing pages for your ads before launching a campaign. Of course, it can take some time. After placing these landing pages correctly, you can observe huge paid traffic coming to your site immediately.

• The amount of money you need to invest

For SEO, you need to pay more cost than SEM in the short run. An SEO strategy does not cost more money in the way that Search Engine Marketing ads cost for one engagement. However, in order to get organic visibility, companies will have to invest a lot of time and effort into Search Engine Optimization. When a company wants to improve its SEO, it may need to hire SEO strategists and content writers. At the same time, there is a need for investment in SEO tools. From this thing, it is obvious that SEO involves a high upfront cost because results can come after months or years to produce an ROI. However once a company succeeds in achieving organic visibility, it can give it a lot of traffic without investing any money. This is how an SEO campaign becomes highly profitable in the long run.

Talking about Search Engine Marketing, it can give marketing teams instant results but with money. But when a company lacks the budget, it impacts the visibility of the company negatively and your company’s visibility drops down to where it was actually before using the SEM campaign.

5. Which one is right, SEO or SEM?

There must be an effective marketing strategy, which could emphasize both SEO and SEM. The reason behind it is that both these techniques complement each other. For example, the best practices of SEO can aid marketers craft effective landing pages for their SEM campaigns. At the same time, new websites can use SEM campaigns to produce traffic that can assist them get backlinks and enhance SEO.

Moreover, if we talk about ROI, 70% of marketers see Search Engine Optimization as more effective for generating sales as compared to PPC. On the other side, businesses often get an average of USD 2 returned for USD 1 spent on Google Ads. So, both SEM and SEO are effective in their terms. You can choose any marketing technique that suits you the most in terms of cost, time, and audience targeting.

6. Conclusion

Once you learn the differences between Search Engine Marketing and Search Engine Optimization and the benefits of each marketing technique, it is high time that you choose the best marketing strategy for your business needs. Choosing the right marketing strategy depends on the goals of your marketing campaign. You must have an excellent, high-performing SEO strategy for your business website that is a part of an extensive SEM campaign. Having a finely tuned digital marketing campaign with elements of SEM can bring positive results for your website in terms of ranking in search engines. Build the right marketing strategy with both SEM and SEO now!