Search optimization is an efficient marketing technique used by brands to drive more traffic to their website. It helps them to grow their sales and revenue, and as a result, they can expand their business.
When it comes to search optimization, many people get confused with SEM and SEO. The question "are SEO and SEM the same thing" is quite common. While they may sound the same, in reality, they are two very different tactics. Unless you know the difference between the two, you won’t be able to form an effective strategy for your brand.
Some marketers use both the terms interchangeably which is completely wrong. To help you out, we have clarified in detail what you should know about SEO and SEM.
SEO is short for search engine optimization. This is defined as the process of optimizing your website to get more traffic from search engines. It is used to improve the visibility of your website. In other words, it helps you rank your website on the top of the search engine results page.
SEO is extremely important for your website as it helps you communicate with search engines. When you have an optimized website, it is better understood by search engine bots that crawl and index website content.
There are three important things in SEO:
This is the process of optimizing your website for the indexing and crawling phase. With the help of technical SEO, you make sure that search engines can index and crawl your website, and that your site pages load as quickly as possible.
This type of SEO is done away from the site and is also known as link building. It involves getting links from other websites to make your site stand out in the eyes of search engines.
This is the type of SEO that is done on your website and webpages. This involves improving the user experience of the site and also creating quality content. Not just that, but you also have to optimize your content for relevant keywords. In this case, you optimize the title, meta description, URLs, and subheadings of your content.
SEM or search engine marketing is defined as a digital marketing process that helps you to increase the visibility of your site by either using paid PPC (pay per click) advertising or through organic SEO.
In the case of PPC advertising, you pay and buy advertising space in the SERPs. This means you pay to rank higher in the search results page, instead of applying any SEO strategies.
Google Ads is the primary search provider for pay per click advertising, but there are many other platforms that offer PPC ads (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc). In this case, companies have to conduct keyword research and find the best keywords related to their products, services, and website. When these keywords are searched by customers, they are shown custom ads at the top or bottom of the search engine results page or on partnered network sites that display ads. Every time a user clicks on the shown link, the brand is charged for it.
Before we learn the difference between the two tactics, let us find out how they are similar to each other.
Both SEO and SEM help in improving the visibility of your website. The goal of both strategies is to rank your website higher in the search engine results.
In both cases, you need to have good knowledge about who your target customers are. With the help of segmentation and buyer personas, you can learn about your customers and also find out what they need. Based on this you can create engaging content to attract them.
The main aim of both SEO and SEM is to drive more traffic to your website. Each of the strategies uses tactics to increase click-through rates.
Both SEM and SEO makes use of keyword research to find the best target keywords.
Now that you have an idea about the similarities of both the strategies, let’s point out the main differences now.
SEM makes use of paid PPC ads to improve the ranking of your website, whereas SEO doesn’t involve any ads. Paid ads are placed through SEM tactics. You can usually see an ad tag beside the placement.
SEM search results appear different than SEO search results. That’s because SEM search results come with ad extensions. This may even include additional links, callouts, and phone numbers. But as far as SEO search results are concerned, they appear with featured snippets.
Since SEM search results are paid, you are charged every time a user clicks on the result. This is why you need to have a separate budget to support SEM ads. However, SEO search results do not involve any such things. No matter, how many times a user clicks on the link, you will not be charged.
In SEM strategy, you can select your audience who you want to see the search results. This is done with the help of filters like location, age, habits, income, and more. However, in SEO you cannot select your audience for the search results.
Whether it is SEM or SEO, both are effective only when you use them correctly. From the above discussion, we know that SEM and SEO have certain similarities between them. But they very different tactics. Now that you know the differences between the two, it should help you to formulate the right strategy for your brand.
