What’s The Difference Between SEO And SEM?
According to Bgrowthninja Online Marketing Consultant Rated Best Digital Marketing Consultant In Delhi And Awarded Best Digital Marketing Consultant In Mumbai SEO Stands For Search Engine Optimization And SEM Stands For Search Engine Marketing Or Google Adwords Which Is One Of The Main Pay-Per-Click Advertising Platforms Available.
So We’re Going To Go Over Some Of The Differences Here And These Are Key Distinctions That A Lot Of People Kind Of Jumbled Together.
And Making Sure That You Understand The Difference Between The Two Will Kind Of Help Frame The Question Of “Okay Well Which One Should I Be Using In My Business And Which One Should I Invest In First “?If I Have To Make A Decision Between The Two.
So The First Difference Between SEO And SEM Is “Free Versus Paid”.
So In Search Engine Optimization, If Somebody Clicks On Your Listing In The Search Results You Don’t Pay Anything.
However, I Put Quotes Around It, Because In Order To Get Your Site To Show Up In The Search Results It’s Probably Going To Take Some Work. “You Have To Have A Good Site Structure” “Good Content” “Lots Of Links” And That Doesn’t Just Happen Naturally.
So It’s Free When Somebody Clicks On It, But There May Be A Lot Of Work And Expense That Goes Into Getting All Those Things In Place So That It Does Rank Organically.
Now Search Engine Marketing Is The Process Of Strategically Placing Online Adwords Or PPC Campain And Paying A Certain Amount Every Time The Ad Is Clicked.
Now That Could Be Great Because You Only Pay When Somebody Clicks, You Don’t Pay To Have Your Ads Show Up But It Definitely Is A Paid Service There’s A Cost To It.
So The Next Difference Between SEO And SEM Is That Search Engine Optimization Is Slow To Change AND SEM Is Fast.
So You Can Do A Lot Of Work Maybe Publish Content Build Links, But Your Site May Not See A Significant Jump In The Search Engines Right Away.
Whereas With SEM OR Pay-Per-Click, If We Set Up A Campaign And As Soon As It’s Approved By Google Which Sometimes Can Be As Quick As A Couple Of Minutes Or A Few Hours We Can Start Running That Immediately.
So If We Want To Push Out A New Product And Your Service, We Want To Bring Some More Clients Into Business, We Can Get Pay-Per-Click Up And Running Almost Immediately And Start Seeing The Results From That Campaign
Now The Next Thing Is What Kind Of Influences The Performance Of Each Of These Different Products?
So Search Engine Optimization Kind Of The Big Three Things That I See As Influencing is:
- How Your Site Ranks Our Structure?
- How Well Is Your Code Written On Your Website?
Is It Laid Out In A Search Engine Friendly Fashion Can The Robots Crawl Your Site All The Technical Aspects Of It Is That Really Sound?
The Next Thing Is Content, Do You Have Valuable Content? That The Visitors Come To Your Site Are Going To Find Valuable And The More That The Visitors Find Your Content Valuable The More Google Is Going To Rank Your Site Higher In The Search Engines.
And The Last Thing Is Links The More People That Link To Your Site The More Authoritative Google Sees You And Again The Better You’re Going To Rank.
Now All Of These Things Don’t Matter At All For SEM OR Pay-Per-Click Advertising.
The Three Main Things That Google Looks At Is Where To Show Your Ad In The Search Results
- Are The Ads Click-Through Rate? So If You Have Higher Click-Through Rate It’s Going To Be More Likely To Show Up.
- How Good Is The Landing Page That The Ad Takes You To?
- Does It Match The Searchers Intent?
- How Well Does It Match The Ad?
- Does It Have All The Best Practices In Place And How Much You’re Paying?
So These Things Matter A Lot But If You’re Not Paying Enough You’re Not Going To Show Up So The The Bid Amount Is Also Important.
Okay The Next Difference Between SEO And SEM Is That Search Engine Optimization Is Very Unpredictable And SEM Is Predictable.
If You Paid It All Attention To The Some Of The Updates That Have Come Out With Panda, Hummingbird, Caffeine, The New Mobile Update Where Your Site Asking Mobile Responsive To Show Up In The Mobile Search Results.
It’s Always Changing And We’re Never Quite Sure Exactly How The Different Changes Are Going To Impact A Website.
Google Gives Us A Pretty Good Framework, But There’s Still A Lot Of Effects That We Don’t Completely Know.
So I Want To Say It’s Not Completely Unpredictable But It’s Pretty Unpredictable.
Whereas SEM OR Pay-Per-Click On The Other End Is Very Predictable. Because We’re Able To Track From The Ad To The Landing Page, To The Website, To The Call.
We’re Able To Track The Complete Process From Beginning To End And Know Where We’re Doing Well And Where We’re Losing Customers.
So It’s A Very Math-Based System, We Know “How Much We Pay” “How Many People Click”, “How Many Calls We Get”, It’s A Very Predictable Process.
Okay The Next So The Next Difference Between SEO And SEM Is That SEO Is Cumulative And On The Other Hand SEM Is Not.
So What Does That Mean?
Well If You Write Let’s Say, You Write A Dozen Blog Posts And You Put Them On Your Website.Well Each Of Those Blog Posts May Be Able To Bring In Customers To Your Business
And As Long As Those Blog Posts Are On Your Website That May Be Enough Work That You’ve Put In To Constantly Bring A Flow Of Traffic.
So You Do The Work Once And You Get To Reap The Benefits For A Long Time.
However In Case Of SEM, If You Stop Paying Your Ads Stop Showing Up.
You Don’t Get Any Benefit From Being On There A Long Time. If You Stop Paying For The Ads Your Ads Stop Showing Up.
However Because If You Start Doing Retargeting Which Is Part Of A Pay-Per-Click Advertising Platform.
In Retargeting You Have To Build Up A List Of People That You Can Market.
So It’s A Little Bit More Cumulative Because Over Time That Retargeting List Builds Up And You’re Able To Market To More And More People.
There’s A Little Bit Of Accumulation That Happens When You’ve Been Marketing On The Google Adwords Platform For A Long Time.
Okay The Last Difference Between SEO And SEM Is That SEO Is Hard To Split Test Where As SEM Is Easy.
If You Want To Try Something Out If You’re Not Sure Why Should I Do A Or Started? It Takes A Long Time To Get Enough Data To Figure Out Which Decision Is The Best.
On The Other Hand SEM You’re Practically Required To Split Test So Any Good Attitude Account There’s Going To Be Multiple Ads Port Per Ad Group And Knowing Which One Is Going To Do The Best.
You Only Know That After Split Testing And Running Multiple Ads, Running Multiple Campaigns And Seeing Which Ones Provide The Best Results Are The Only Way To Get A Great Performing Pay-Per-Click Campaign.
So That’s Kind Of The Breakdown Of Search Engine Optimization Versus SEM.
Now If I Had Only One To Invest In, I Would Lean Towards Starting With Pay-Per-Click Advertising.
And Why Do I Say That?
Well Mainly Because You Can Start Immediately Once You Throw Up A Campaign And You Start Getting Some Results Coming In, You Start Seeing The Sort Of Ads That People Are Clicking On The Sort Of Keywords That Are Driving The Most Traffic.
Then You’re Able To Take Those Results And Start Applying It To Your SEO Campaigns. So The Keywords That You Think May Be Converting Customers May Not Be The Keywords That Are Actually Bringing People In And Turning Into Buying Customers.
So Starting The Pay-Per-Click You Can Start Very Quickly. It’s Very Predictable And You Can Start Getting Results Right Away And Once You Kind Of Have A Better Idea Of What You Should Be Optimizing For Then You Can Start Throwing It Into An SEO Campaign And Trying To Rank Organically.
That’s The Difference Between SEO And SEM, There’s A Lot More Nuances Between The Two But That Gives You A Pretty Good Overview