What Is SEM? How Important Is It?

What Exactly Is SEM?

SEM and SEO are contemporary, digital marketing-related terms that are often misunderstood and misinterpreted.

Whilst most of us are better acquainted with SEO or Search Engine Optimization, how many of us know about SEM or Search Engine Marketing?

The term SEM is a form of digital marketing. It involves the promotion of a website by optimization and advertising to increase its visibility in search engine results.

In fact, SEM is an umbrella term for SEO, SMO and other search marketing tactics.

How does SEM work?

SEM is basically the process of utilizing paid strategies to increase search visibility. In SEM, brands pay for ads to appear as search engine results or SERPS or Search Engine Result Pages.

How Does SEM Benefit Your Website?

Search Engine Optimization or SEO allows you to implement certain tactics to optimize your website for better visibility in search engines. Online advertising is another tactic that allows you to send promotional content to the target audience of your choice.

SEM is a clever combination of both these benefits.

• By using paid ads, brands can instantly connect with their target audience.

• Provides exposure and increases brand awareness.

• SEM gives you the option of targeting people based on their location.

• Ads can be customized according to your budget.

• SEM allows you to set up a schedule to run your marketing campaigns.

• You can make your ads appear based on searches made with specific keywords.

• Optimized search ads drive considerable traffic to your website.

• PPC or Pay-Per-Click allows you to pay only when a user clicks on your ad. Otherwise, your ads will appear for free.

SEO and SEM : The Big Difference

To understand the difference between both terms, we first have to understand what SEO is.

Search Engine Optimization is the process of increasing the number of visitors to a website by putting the website on top of the search engine results.

The rules and methodologies of SEO are constantly changing because they are controlled by the changes made to Google’s algorithm.

What really sharpens SEO are the off-page and on-page activities that include:

• Usage of selective keywords in meta titles, descriptions and heading tags.

• Well-written blog posts and page copy.

• Clean and formatting page URLs.

• Optimized page loading speed.

• Social sharing integration.

Off-page elements include:

• Link-building.

• Social signals

• Social book-marking sites.

And much, much more!

The biggests difference between SEM and SEO:

• SEM is a paid search strategy and SEO is an organic search strategy.

• SEO is free of cost and with SEM you pay every time a user clicks on your ad.

• SEO gives you results over time, SEM gives you instant results.

• SEO puts your brand out there for anyone to see but SEM targets specific audiences.

• While SEM is the better option for testing, only SEO gives you a higher click-through rate.

Final thoughts: Which is the better option?

Although SEO is a component of a much wider SEM, SEM cannot succeed without a good SEO. Yet, PPC or Pay-Per-Click is a vital aspect of SEM that gives you instant results- something that you cannot expect with SEO.

At the same time, your brand and website cannot thrive on PPC alone. They require SEO to survive in the long run.

So, SEO and SEM are equally important. One must fully understand both these marketing strategies to make optimal use of them.

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