Did you know that social media marketing is a component of search engine marketing? All digital marketers should know the primary difference between SEO and SEM. Whether you handle social, search or design, being aware of different terminology when it comes to online marketing is useful so you can understand the different digital tasks that marketers are working on.
There are so many jargons to learn when it comes to online marketing. But surely you've heard of the term SEO (Search Engine Optimization) by now. Even if you don't know what it entails, you probably know your website has to be optimized in a certain way to rank higher on the search engines like Google and Yahoo. Higher rank means more traffic, hopefully leading to more conversion.
Let's say you are in the real estate business, just like our company. Search engine optimization is an important marketing component because we can drive visitors searching for valuable keywords related to our apartments directly to our website. The beauty is that once you are ranked well organically, you don't have to pay for Pay-Per-Click advertising
Then what is SEM (Search Engine Marketing)? The two terms, SEO and SEM are often used interchangeably, even by industry experts. But they are only half correct. While SEO can be a part of SEM, it doesn't work the other way around. Simply put, SEO is a subset of SEM.
What is SEM?
Search Engine Marketing encompasses different techniques to harness a search engine's technology. The two major tenets of SEM include SEO and PPC (Pay-Per-Click) ads. Google AdWords and Bing Ads are some of the most popular PPC vendors.
You might have seen PPC ads on Google - they are generally located above or on the right-hand side of the search results and you can distinguish them quite easily. In this way, SEM incorporates both free and paid means to achieve higher ranking on search engines.
SEM can also include social media marketing, as social media has risen in prominence in the last few years to influence consumer behavior. In short, SEM refers to all available forms of marketing to increase your website's visibility on search engines.
How is SEO different from SEM?
There is no main difference per se, as SEO is simply a narrower discipline of SEM. SEO's primary aim is to provide natural, organic search results for free. With SEM, things may not always be free as it uses paid ads for the certain keywords on search engine results page.
If you are a social media marketer and have not yet added, "Search Engine Marketing" to your LinkedIn skillset, you can now confidently do so. Social marketing is just one of the many pieces to the pie of search engine marketing. Just make sure you know the difference between SEO and SEM so you can be prepared to answer this in your next big meeting!