The main difference between SEO and SEM is that search engine optimization (SEO) focuses on optimizing a website to get traffic from organic search results.
What is the difference between SEO and SEM?
The main difference between SEO and SEM is that search engine optimization (SEO) focuses on optimizing a website to get traffic from organic search results. On the other hand, Search Engine Marketing (SEM) aims to get traffic and input from organic and paid searches.
In other words, it can be said that:
Google search results are divided into two main categories:
- Paid search results
- Organic search results
The goal of SEO is to rank our website in organic search results.
SEO is where you focus 100% on ranking in organic results. But SEM is when you use SEO and PPC (pay-for-click advertising) to get traffic from search engines.
With these interpretations, it can be said that SEM is in the higher category and has SEO on the one hand and PPC on the other, which uses both to reach the input and, ultimately, more income.
With that explained, it’s time to examine some of the main differences between SEM and SEO.
The main features of SEO or SEM:
An Overview of SEO
SEO is continuously optimizing a website to rank in the SERP organic and unpaid search engine results in pages. Google uses more than 200 factors for ranking in its algorithm.
The basics of SEO can be divided into four main subcategories:
- On-page SEO (Internal SEO)
- Off-page SEO
- SEO Technical
- User interaction signals
Internal SEO or On-page SEO
It is when you optimize your website based on the keywords that your target customer searches on Google and other search engines. For example, one of the best internal SEO practices is to include your primary keyword in your web page’s title tag, meta description, and URL.
To learn about the principles and basics of SEO, visit this article.
External SEO or Off-page SEO
External SEO means receiving trust and credibility signals from other websites. This mainly involves building high-quality backlinks to your site. But Google may also use other off-page signs to increase your site’s credibility, such as social network shares and…
Technical SEO or SEO Technical
It is when you make sure that Google and other search engines can find (crawl) and index all the pages of your website. Technical SEO also includes things like making sure your pages load quickly.
User Interaction Signals: How users interact with your site helps Google understand whether your page is suitable for others to search for. For example, if your page has a high bounce rate, it could be a sign that it isn’t providing the correct answer for someone and isn’t leading the user to the search goal. And if Google doesn’t find your page suitable for that keyword, it can remove your rank from the first page or lower it.
An Overview of SEM
Remember: SEM is at the top level, which includes SEO. So everything I explained above for SEO also applies to SEM. But in addition to SEO, SEM also includes PPC. And PPC itself is a topic that has a set of features, best practices, and more.
When discussing PPC, we must remember that our competitors can also pay more to rank higher in Google ads. So, as the famous saying goes, “The more you pay, the more you eat.” And when someone clicks on your ad, you pay whatever amount you bid. The amount you pay when someone clicks on your ad is known as cost per click or CPC.
Quality score: Quality score is a significant measure of Google ads. This is Google’s way of determining if your ad matches what others are searching for. Google calculates Quality Score based on a combination of click-through rate, the quality of your landing page, and the overall quality score of your Google Ad account. And if your ad has a high-quality score, you’ll get a discount for every click.
How much does SEO or SEM cost?
Many people are attracted to SEO because of the “free traffic.” You don’t pay when someone clicks on your site in Google search results. But make no mistake; SEO is not free. Getting to the top of Google results takes thinking, time, and money.
Imagine, we need to find the right keywords for a page or post to rank up, if we want to do this on a professional and extensive level, we need paid tools. After that, we should spend time and write a clean and professional article. Now it’s time to add graphic designs; we have to go to a visual artist for our unique designs. These are the most apparent expenses we must make on the way to the first rank of Google. However, there is no guarantee that you will rank first.
Now compare with SEM where you pay the total cost, and you are 100% sure that your page will be among the top results of Google, and naturally, you will get feedback. But immediately after the end of the considered budget, the entries will be zero.
With a simple calculation, we come to the conclusion that PPC is the right choice for the short term and SEO is for establishing your brand position among competitors.
Should we focus on SEO or PPC?
In the following article, we will examine different conditions in which it is better to choose one or both SEO and PPC.
Focus on SEO
You have a minimal budget: If you are a startup or small business with a small marketing budget, it is better to focus on SEO. You may not see an ROI on your SEO budget for months or years. But it still makes more sense than spending a budget on PPC ads that might only pay off for a week.
You can rank for educational keywords. Educational keywords use “how, how,” and other question words. Due to the significant search volume, SEO is the best option if you feel that you can write great content about the topics that users search on Google.
You can wait for SEO; content marketing takes time to start working. So if you can wait 6-12 months for legitimate traffic to start from Google search, go for SEO.
You are good at link building. Creating high-quality content is an integral part of ranking in Google. But it is not enough. If you are serious about ranking, you should use a few different link-building strategies to get other sites to link to you.
Focus on PPC
One of the nice things about PPC advertising is that you can set an exact budget. That way, it’s impossible to spend more than you planned.
If you don’t know what you’re doing, you can easily blow that budget.
This means you need a regular monthly budget that you can play with to figure out what combination of keyword targeting, ad copy, landing pages, and bids works best for you.
You can manage an Adwords account On the surface, PPC seems pretty straightforward. But in practice, managing a Google Ads account is no joke. It would help if you considered keyword targeting, ads, quality score, ROI, conversion rate, etc., and processed all this data to decide how to get the most out of your ads.
You can set up and test landing pages, one of the first things you will learn about PPC is that you need targeted landing pages for every ad. So to get the most out of PPC, you need a way to launch many different web pages quickly.
Focus on both (SEM)
Since both of these tasks require experts and spending time, I must say that if you have a relatively large business and you can use experienced people to do SEO and PPC, In this case, the conditions for using two aspects of SEM are available.