The Difference Between Search Optimization and SEM

Search Optimization - Search engine optimization (SEO) and Search engine marketing (SEM) often overlaps and that is why people often get confused with these terms. However, there is a difference between SEO and SEM. But, let's start off with search engine optimization

You should never underestimate the power of SEO and if you do this correctly, you will move up in the search engine results super fast. Search engines play a big role in driving traffic to your site, and the ranking position of your website will determine how many visitors you will get to your site. So, SEO is the process of optimizing your website in such a way to improve your natural or organic rank in SE's like Google.

Search optimization includes on-page factors, which involves the way you code your website, and the tweaking of the keyword placement. Off-page factors involve the process of building backlinks to improve the ranking of your site.

On the other hand, SEM is the process of marketing your website in the SE's through using pay-per-click (PPC), banners and SEO. In other words, SEM includes both PPC and SEO and other paid advertising to get traffic to your site.

PPC is most commonly associated with Google Adwords, which is the best form of paid advertising on the internet. Other SE's cannot compare to the massive amounts of traffic that you can get by setting up and running an Adwords campaign correctly.

However, for a successful SEM campaign it is best to use a combination of both pay-per-click and search optimization. PPC will take care of instant traffic to your site and it will identify excellent SEO keyword phrases you can optimize your site for. Since search optimization can take very long before you start seeing results, it will be advisable to use PPC to target your core keywords initially, until they are ranked well on the organic listings. In other words, PPC can serve as a pathway for SEO in terms of keywords.

At the same time, SEO can indirectly help with the quality score of pay-per-click advertising. One of the factors that determine your quality score in terms of Google includes your site and page content which SEO naturally takes care of.

For the best results we have found it most profitable when a combination of both SEO and PPC strategies are being employed.

With a little help, you can start to overcome all of these issues