Search engine optimization (SEO) can help search engines understand your website’s content. Furthermore, it can play its part in connecting your website with the users by providing them with the right types of results as per their search queries.
Search engine marketing (SEM), on the other hand, is a digital marketing strategy that is used to boost a website’s visibility through organic SEO and paid search advertising.
Both SEO and SEM have their own sets of pros and cons. However, one unifying factor between them is that they are essential to make your website become the first and the only option for your target audience.
In this thorough blog post, you’ll learn about what’s the difference between SEO & SEM. So, let’s begin!
What’s the difference between SEO vs. SEM?
Let’s understand their difference with a basic overview of both of them.
SEO
SEO is basically optimizing the website so as to rank in the organic search engine results. Google utilizes more than 200+ ranking signals in its algorithm for the same. However, SEO can be divided into four different parts. They are on-page, off-page, and technical SEO. The fourth component of SEO is the user interaction signals.
1. On-Page SEO: With the help of on-page SEO, you can optimize your website around the keywords that your potential clients are searching for. One common practice for on-page SEO is to incorporate the primary keywords in your meta description and your website’s URL.
2. Off-Page SEO: This aspect of SEO majorly focuses on getting a good amount of credibility and trust from other third-party websites. It involves building good-quality backlinks for your website. Some of the off-page signals that Google may use to check your website’s authority are social media sharing and EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authority, & Trust).
3. Technical SEO: This SEO feature will help you ensure that Google and other search engines can crawl and index different web pages on your website. With the help of technical SEO, you can also make sure that your web pages load in a lot more swift manner. Keeping a check on your website’s architecture is set up appropriately also comes under the technical part of SEO.
4. User Interaction Signals: The course of action that your users opt for to interact with your website will help Google figure out if your web page is the right option. Let’s say your website has a quite high bounce rate; it’s a clear signal that your page isn’t providing the required answer for the user’s query. In case Google considers that your web page isn’t the right option for a particular keyword, your website’s ranking might experience a little drop. In fact, your website’s ranking can drop from the first search results page itself.
Also Read: What Are The Different Types of SEO?
SEM
SEM is an umbrella term consisting of SEO and PPC. Some of the defining features and best approaches for SEM are as follows:-
1. Bidding: The main component of SEM’s paid advertising is known as bidding. It is utilized while using Google Ads or running ads on other search engines. With its help, you can bid on a strategic keyword. Whenever someone searches for that keyword, your ad will show up in one of the top spots. The rankings of the ads are comparable to how much someone is bidding. In case you happen to be the highest bidder, you’ll get your ad ranked above other ads. Whenever someone clicks on your ad, you will automatically pay the amount that you had bid for earlier. The cost that you will incur when a person clicks on your ad is called cost per click (CPC).
2. Quality Score: Did you know that the quality score is one of the most crucial Google Ads metrics? It is used by Google to find out whether your ad is a good match for the keywords or search terms that your target audience is searching for. Google finds out the quality score depending on a robust combination of click-through rate, your landing page’s quality, and the overall quality of your Google Ad account. The best part is that if your ad has a good quality score, you’ll get a substantial discount on each click.
3. Mobile SEO: Nowadays, people are searching a lot more on their mobile phones instead of their personal desktop computers. That’s why optimizing your SEM campaigns for mobile users is a lot more crucial. In fact, Google also focuses on the mobile version of any website to index and rank as well. With the right type of mobile SEO strategies, your website’s user experience will become a whole lot better. As a result, you will fetch plenty of traffic and leads for your website, ensuring the success of your business site.
4. Local SEO: If your website doesn’t get the expected results in local search results, there’ll be practically no benefit from your SEM campaign. With the help of an ideal SEM campaign optimized for local search results, your business website will get plenty of local leads with high chances of conversion. Local SEO includes several aspects, which include optimizing your Google Business Profile along with the other local listings. The same local search intent can be used for paid advertising! You can double down on the bidding of the local keywords to get plenty of prospective customers for your online business.
How much time will it take to get results for SEO & SEM?
The differentiating factor between SEO & SEM is the speed of results. You need to understand that SEO will take its own sweet time to show results. In case your website is a new one and lacks the right type of backlinks, be prepared to wait for a significant timeframe. According to a report, at least two years are required to rank on the first page of Google’s search engine results. In fact, there are many top-ranking websites that were published more than three years ago.
It doesn’t mean that you would have to work for two years straight without expecting any results. If you target the long tail keywords and follow foolproof SEO strategies, you can get to see great results in the first six months.
Alternatively, if you double down on SEM, you can see great results on the day your SEM campaign is live. In fact, it will happen that you run the SEM ad during the evening, and you will start getting results by the next morning.
However, that doesn’t mean that you’ll get a great ROI on the first day itself. In most cases, it might take many months of testing and adjusting to get a great ROI from SEM. But, still, there’s no doubt that SEM will give you results much quicker than SEO.
What’s the cost of SEO vs. SEM?
The total costs of SEO and SEM can vary a lot and that depends on different factors. SEO is completely organic, but it isn’t free. Doing SEO appropriately means to invest in website optimization, content production, backlink outreach along with SEO tools.
Now, you will ask how much will it add up to? The clear answer is that it depends.
A local business is going to spend lesser on SEO than their multinational counterpart. It’s because of their different goals and competition levels.
There have been numerous studies which indicates that the average cost of SEO comes at about a $1000 per month. However, your budget might differ a great deal according to your goals.
On the other hand, SEM will include allocating a significant budget to create and manage the PPC campaigns, along with focusing on organic SEO.
According to a study, the SEM costs can vary between $100 to $10,000 per month.
This exorbitant cost difference is a clear indicator that businesses with limited budgets will stick with the organic strategies in their brand’s nascent stages.
However, you need to understand that SEM campaigns will help you get results much faster. It can prove to be quite important for businesses who want to get much more sales in a relatively shorter timeframe.
How Can You Utilize Both SEO & SEM?
The major unifying factor working behind both SEO & SEM is keywords. It can drive a good amount of traffic to your business website along with the relevant web pages. The major difference between them is that SEM includes paid advertising along with a fine balance of SEO, whereas SEO is completely organic.
As per the latest trends, your target audience will search for your products and services on online platforms before they make a purchase. That’s more of the reason why, you need to have a robust presence on the search engines.
Utilizing both SEO and SEM will capture plenty of online traffic, and that too, from both organic and paid channels. You can use the data from your SEM campaigns to better your SEO keyword strategies and vice versa.
It will give you a much better chance to get good-quality traffic and increase your conversion rates.
Once you have a website that is SEO-friendly and paid ads that are strategically targeted with the appropriate keywords, your site’s visibility will get a boost. But, you need to remember that you should utilize SEO tactics so that Google sees your website as an authoritative one in your niche.
Pro Tip: If your website is new, you can double down on your SEM campaigns first. As a result, your website’s SEO rankings will also improve.
The future of SEO and SEM
Search marketing is one of the biggest digital marketing mediums of the present day and age. In fact, the future of search marketing will move towards becoming a lot more user-specific and innovative. It’s next to impossible to predict what will happen in the SEO and SEM fields. But some of the probable directions are as follows:-
1. Artificial Intelligence(AI): Did you know that the biggest search engines like Google are leveraging AI to understand the user intent and provide even better results? Google has launched AI Overviews since then, and search results have changed a lot because of it. That’s more of the reason why you need to keep the search intent higher on the priority level. Alongside this, you must also provide the most useful information to your target audience to get the credibility that you deserve.
2. AI Tools: You can also use AI tools to improve your website’s SEO and SEM. These tools are becoming a lot more important nowadays for optimizing the campaigns.
3. Google’s Algorithms: Google is regularly updating its algorithms! But some of its ranking factors are ambiguous making it quite hard for digital marketers to rank their websites. The small updates come up regularly but it’s the core updates that you must keep a check upon if you’re serious about ranking your website.
4. Zero-Click Searches: Did you know that there are many users who leave search engine results without even clicking on any paid or organic results? This could mean two things. One is that the searchers aren’t able to find the information that they seek on the web. The other aspect is that the featured snippets and AI overviews provide the relevant information that the searchers need. These zero-click searches will not drive traffic, but getting your website featured on them can build the authority of your site.
5. YouTube: When you’re utilizing SEM, looking at YouTube as a platform is crucial. It is one of the biggest search engines, and it’s going to get even bigger in the future. So, utilizing YouTube ads for your search engine marketing will go a long way to make your brand grow at an exponential level.
Final Words
SEO vs. SEM are quite different from each other. Both these mediums are reliant on search engines, but their workings are quite distinct. SEO focuses on utilizing organic methods to get your website ranked with the help of on-page, off-page, and technical SEO. SEM, on the other hand, uses organic SEO and paid ad campaigns to get to the top of the search results.
Both these mediums are powerful, but SEO takes some amount of time to show results, whereas SEM’s results will show up considerably faster. So, choose SEO or SEM as per your business website’s requirements. ‘
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