What is SEO and SEM? What are their difference?
By venturing into digital marketing or online marketing to increase your online presence, surely you will come across these two terms: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM). What are they? Is there any difference between them?
It is important to understand these two terms and the difference between them before you commit anything into it. In this post, we will explain these two terms, hopefully it will become useful for you.
What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process which affect visibility of your website in search engine and ensuring your website appear high in the search engine list when visitors search for related terms related to your website. SEO generate traffic through the use of ‘unpaid’ results (without paying for cost per click) or also known as organic search results.
SEO marketing professional need to understand how search engine & search algorithms work. By knowing this, marketing professional can use various strategy for SEO, including optimizing your content & website, submitting your website to search engines, putting relevant keywords, creating backlink, social sharing and many other methods.
What is Search Engine Marketing (SEM)?
Search Engine Marketing does encompass Search Engine Optimization tactics, which also include action of promoting a website through paid advertising. That mean that SEM is much broader term than SEO that include search engine optimization, paid listing and many other related services to increase your visibility and ranking of your website.
In SEM, other than SEO efforts, there are certain work involved to increase your visibility and ranking in search engine which are research and analysis of keywords related to your business, target audience adjustment, advertisement design and content, evaluation and adjustment of advertisement campaign.
Search engine paid advertising such as Google Ad and Microsoft Ads. You can start by registering an account and need a credit card to process your payment for ads.
What is main difference between SEO and SEM?
The main difference between these two is that search engine optimization main aim is to provide your website with organic search results while search engine marketing is much broader term where it also cover paid advertising.
Note that these two terms have interchangeably but they are not the same term even though they are under the umbrella of Digital Marketing and they are common marketing strategy used by business of all sizes.
There you go, hopefully this article will help you get an idea about search engine optimization and search engine marketing before you get into it to increase your website visibility in search engine.
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