SEO and SEM are two acronyms that almost everyone has heard of before in this day and age, but what are they and how can they improve your business?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the organic process of optimizing your website to increase the number of visitors by having your website appear in the top tier of the search engine results page based on the identifying search word. Whereas, Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is internet marketing that results in companies receiving a higher placement on the search engine results page by bidding on search terms.
The optimization of keywords that appear on your website is essential to obtaining the organic results you seek through the use of SEO. By including keywords, meta descriptions, tags, and more on your website, you are increasing your chances of organic website visitors. SEO is a long process that often takes a reasonable amount of time to see valuable traffic results, but a company with patience will benefit significantly from SEO strategies if they have done their research on the correct keywords to use and are looking to save money.
SEM helps you to target the exact customers you want, lasts only as long as your campaigns are active, and provides more immediate results in comparison to SEO. SEO is an element of SEM in addition to other strategies such as advertisements, pay per click, social media marketing, retargeting ads, mobile ads, shopping campaign ads, and other paid search approaches. SEM is a more significant strategy for a company that is looking for immediate results but is more costly than SEO.
In order to grow your business online, the use of SEO and SEM is imperative. While practicing the use of SEO on your website, you are increasing your performance on the organic search engine results page, and while using SEM, you are investing in marketing your company to reach more customers through paid advertisements. The main difference between SEO and SEM is that SEO is organically presented on search engines through an algorithm through the identifying search word, which you will not pay for if a user clicks on, and SEM is a paid ad that your company will pay for every time a user clicks on your advertisement. When your goal is to gain visibility for your website through search engine results pages, then you should use both SEO and SEM to accomplish this.
