SEO vs SEM – What is the difference?

There are a few digital marketing tools that have garnered prominence over time. Amongst those tools are search engine marketing and search engine optimization. Whilst both are used to attract the attention of users, there’s a subtle yet important difference between SEO and SEM that helps using them more effectively. 

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is using strategies like keyword placement, backlinking, user experience improvement, and some other SEO strategies to optimize the content of the website. These strategies help attract organic traffic. On the other hand, search engine marketing (SEM) is a combination of SEO and PPC (pay-per-click advertising). SEM marketing is used to attract both organic and paid traffic to your site.  

What is Search Marketing? 

Search marketing is a digital marketing strategy used to attract both organic and paid traffic. Increasing traffic on the company’s website is one of the most important digital marketing goals for businesses and search marketing can help them achieve that. Every single day millions of people use different search engines to look for answers for the most basic queries from what restaurant they want to go to, to an answer for an everyday problem. Almost every customer experience starts with a search so it’s important for businesses to rank for the right keywords. 

Search marketing is an umbrella term used for both SEO and SEM, which are both tactics used to increase traffic on your website by capturing a prominent spot in the search engine results pages (SERPs). 

What is SEO?

Search engine optimization is a search marketing strategy used to organically increase traffic on your website. It does so by making sure the website ranks higher on search engines results pages for the right keywords. There are four core pillars of search engine optimization. Marketers commonly use a mix of these pillars to optimize their websites. These pillars include:

• On-page SEO: On-page search engine optimization is used to optimize the elements within the web pages to make search engines understand the content in context. These elements include titles, headings, content itself, meta descriptions, and image alt tags. 

• Technical SEO: Technical search engine optimization is used to enhance the structure of the website by focusing on site speed, mobile-friendliness, security, crawlability, and indexing.

• Off-page SEO: Off-page SEO is used to build a website’s authority with the help of practices like link-building, and other SEO organic tactics. This approach is used to build the trustworthiness and authority of a website in the eyes of the search engines and the users. With the help of this tactic you can make your site rank higher on search engine results pages if the algorithms of search engines recognize your site as the one that has authoritative and reliable links attached to it. 

• Content: Content is one of the most important factors for search engines. If your content doesn’t match the searchers’ intent you won’t be able to rank for it. You need to have a solid content writing strategy in place to make sure your content is engaging and optimized for the right keywords.

What is SEM?

Search Engine Marketing is the paid marketing tactic used to increase traffic on the website. A paid SEM strategy covers two strategies: first setting up and optimizing online ads and the second is setting up a budget that pays for the placement of ads. With this tactic brands conduct keyword research and then create ad campaigns that target the best keywords for their product, industry, or services. 

Key Comparison between SEO and SEM

There are some key factors that differentiate search engine optimization from search engine marketing. These factors help marketers navigate how to use these tools in a better, more effective manner. All these factors can vary depending on what industry your business belongs to, on what scale it operates on and what kind of resources and tools you are using to implement these strategies. 

Differentiating Factors	Search Engine Optimization	Search Engine Marketing
Speed	It takes around 6-7 months after the implementation of a good SEO strategy, to see results.	Results can be seen instantly after the ads are launched
Cost	$750 -$2000/month	$9000-$10000/month
Results	Long-term results	Immediate Results
Purpose	Used to improve visibility and brand loyalty	Used to increase sales and generate more leads
Testing	It takes time to see results as its time consuming to implement new SEO strategies and measure the results of it	It’s a great strategy for testing. You can implement different strategies and immediately measure the results to see which ones more effective

SEM vs SEO: What to focus on?

As marketers we often get confused as to where we should utilize all our digital marketing efforts? While both SEO and SEM are used to increase traffic on websites, which one you should use depends on varying factors like cost, results and the kind of business you have. 

When should SEO be enough for your business?

• You can easily rank for informational keywords:

The informational keywords are basically used to define a certain word like “What is digital marketing?” and “How to implement SEO?”. If you can easily rank for such keywords with the help of engaging and informative content, you should only focus on implementing SEO.

• SEO is relatively budget-friendly.

You don’t require a huge amount of money to implement SEO, especially if you are a small start-up business. It makes more sense for such businesses to invest in SEO instead of burning lumps of money on ads that will only appear on search engines for a week or so. 

• You can wait for the strategy to take full effect

It takes time to see results for the amount you invested on SEO. You implement SEO best practices, if your business can afford to wait for it to take full effect. 

• You have the right experts for link-building

Link-Building is a very important practice in SEO, it helps build authority and increase brand loyalty. So if you are good at link building opt for SEO strategies.

When should you focus on SEM?

• SEM requires budget

You need to plan a budget for SEM persistently because it’s easy to burn through the budget if you don’t know what you are doing. You need a regular monthly budget that you can utilise on ad copies, keyword targeting and bidding. That means you need to have some lumps of money that you can spare on SEM. 

• Have an Adword Account:

Managing a Google Adword account is hard. On the surface SEM may seem easy but it requires effort and resources. You need to take into account multiple SEM elements like keyword targeting, conversion rate, ROI, and quality scores and thoroughly analyse and process all this data to gain fruitful results from SEM.

• You need to be good at deploying and testing landing pages

Once you place an ad, you need to redirect that ad to a landing page, which means you need to have a landing page for each ad or ad group. So to maximise the benefits of your SEM strategy, you need to quickly launch landing pages on your website and run A/B testing on those pages to figure out which one is performing better. 

SEO vs SEM In a Nutshell – Which is better for my Business?

After gaining an understanding of what SEO and SEM are, you can easily identify which one will work best for your business. To decide which one is right for your brand, you should also consider factors such as how well you understand the industry your business operates in, your competitors, your customers’ buying behaviour, the age of your business and the current state of your website. 

If you require the assistance of SEO and SEM experts, you can reach out to NX3Corp. We can help you devise an effective SEO or SEM strategy and can assist you in implementing it in a methodical manner.