Difference between SEO and SEM

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) are two complimentary but uniquely different digital marketing channels; and in some ways, it is quite confusing, especially to the lay users, who often take one for the other. SEO is a powerful tool and over 3.5 billion people use it to access the Internet daily worldwide. This large user-base makes it a veritable tool and unparalleled among other digital marketing channels. Its highly effective market penetration is the main reason many digital marketers and content providers jostle for prominence on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).

Search Engine as a platform, allows users to find information, products and services on the Internet. There are a number of such SEO software applications available on the Internet, and the most popular among them are Google Search Engine, Bing, Yahoo and Baidu to mention a few. Among all of these SEO tools, Google is conspicuously, the most popular with over 40,000 search in a second, totaling over 3.5 billion searches each day globally.

According to Interactivestats, a renowned mobile analytics company, mobile phones remains the most used device to access the Internet, with over 3.8 billion unique mobile phone users worldwide, which means that more searches are conducted using mobile devices than desktop computers and laptops combined.

Search Engine provides the most effective source for Internet users to find information about a product or service before they take a decision to make a purchase. Many people go online just to search for information for research purposes and some others do so to find items and services they want to purchase. Because of this large online presence, Search Engines have become an inevitable tool for digital marketers, content curators, web masters and social media managers to promote their brand by ensuring that they occupy a prominent position on Search Engine Result Pages, using services such as Google AdSense and AdWords.

Search Engine Optimization

When a website meets the conditions favourable to Google crawler-indexing algorithm, such a site is regard as optimized, which translates to Search Engine Optimization. SEO is mostly about the functionality of the website. It is about making minor improvements regularly, ensuring that it contains the appropriate keywords on the Meta tag section; it is free of broken links, pages without improvement have a noindex value; and equally avoid content spinning, keyword stuffing and related black-hat related activities.

Complying with these and several other Google SEO conditions help to improve the rating of a website, because the Google indexing processes becomes flawless, faster and generally reduces the possibility whereby such a site is not indexed. Regular favourable indexing of a page immensely helps the site rating on SERPs.

Search Engine Marketing

Among all the digital marketing channels, Search Engine Marketing, also known as Search Engine Advertising (SEA), is one of the most effective and most used channel by digital marketers and content providers worldwide. This is because it has the largest number of users out of all the digital marketing platforms, with well over 3.5 billion people using the channel to conduct searches for goods, services and information online each day. This massive audience provides a great source of lead generation and it is the major reason digital marketer prefer to place sponsored advertisement on Search Engine Result Pages to help drive traffic to their website and consequently, increase conversion and ROI.

Search Engine Marketing is the process of bidding for popular keywords on search Engines used advertisers and digital marketers to promote their ads campaigns on these platforms wither as text-based ads, which is AdWords or as banner/visual ads format known as AdSense; and both of them are on a pay-per-click basis by Google.

Site owners who have signed up for the Google advert services have these ads, especially the AdSense ads, distributed on sites across the entire web, whereas the AdWords formats are features as ads on Google Search Engine Result Pages, usually, at the top of the search result listing. This happens whenever users search for any of the keywords, which is part of the bidding for the campaign.

Conclusion

The difference between the two are quite distinct, though both of them have a common objective, which is to help generate and drive traffic to the advertisers websites, so as to increase the number of views, engagement and conversion. SEO and SEM, which are quite distinct in context, are both tools that helps to improve website visibility on the Internet. Using SEM to promote a site that has technical flaws or poor Google crawler algorithm will significantly reduce the effectiveness of such a marketing campaign.

In contrast, a site that is clean and compliant is a better optimized website and is much more suitable for Search Engine Marketing.