What’s the difference between SEO and SEM in digital marketing?

This is always confusing to understand the concept of search engine optimization and search engine marketing. SEO and SEM both are interchangeable which makes more confusion.

Both seem the same, is there any difference between them?

Well, yes there is.

Have a look at the following step, to find the difference between SEO and SEM.

Search engine optimization

Search engine optimization is a crucial component of SEM. Basically, “it is the process to make your site visible to the audience and rank the website high in the search results”. This category changes with time. As technology evolves day by day, SEO strategies also change and it’s not constant.  Every website which contains on any niche has need for best SEO services to ranked a website and take so many benefits from its website.

What type of components does SEO consist of?

SEO consists of components: On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO.

Components of ON-Page SEO:

• It optimizes the speed of the page.
• Integrating the keywords into Meta description, alt text, etc.
• Format the page URLs
• Optimized well-written page copy through tactical keywords.
• Social share integration within the content
• And many more…

You should learn How can market and competitor research to promote your business as well

Components of OFF-Page SEO:

• Attract an audience with natural backlinks profile (high quality) and achieve inbound links
• Social bookmarking
• Social signals (increase traffic with social media post sharing)

Develop a strategy with high-quality content, to hit the audience target. To ensure the optimization of blog articles and landing pages, you should learn the best on-page and off-page tactics.

Let’s check out the definition of Search Engine Marketing

Search engine marketing (SEM)

It is from Internet marketing, involves promotional strategies to increase visibility in search engine results pages through advertising and other methods.

What type of components does SEM consist of?

Apart from SEO, search engine marketing consists of paid searches for example advertisements or PPC. Mostly, it includes PPC activities.

Difference between SEO and SEM

Basically, SEO works to increase the visitors and ranks your site high in the search engine. SEM is supposed as internet marketing where it makes your site visible to the audience through advertising and organic search engine results. Search engine marketing includes many marketing tactics including SEO.

In this article, we will answer the frequent questions to explain their differences further.

Which marketing strategy is better?

It’s always been a debate among the marketers that which strategy is better. Inbound marketer considers organic SEO is better. It is because Search engine marketing will not run successfully without organic SEO.

There are also some cases, in which we consider SEM components better than others. PPC (a component of SEM) takes less time but not useful in search engines.

SEO takes much time, yet it saves money and increases visibility in the search engine result pages (SERPS).PPC will not help your site rank high in the search engine.

How to choose the best strategy for your business!

To run the business successfully, estimate the specific needs. I am sure that the above-mentioned strategies make you understand the difference between SEO and SEM. When you evaluate the difference between them, your efforts make your business grow.

Author Bio:

Ellen Wilson is an expert content marketing manager at SolutionSurface. She is a tech geek and loves to contribute the latest technology tips and tricks especially mobile-friendly and responsive web design.