SEO vs SEM: What is the difference between SEO and SEM?

 Among all the digital marketing tools, SEO has always proven to be the cheapest and productive. It helps in understanding the target audience and reaching them. SEO improves the searchability of a website, gives way to website credibility & trust, and user experience. Furthermore, it gives you search query data, analytics data & AI insights, and SERP analysis for a better-targeted approach. A sudden increased surge in mobile usage has endorsed the need for local SEO to optimize local searches. If you have already acknowledged the significance of SEO, you might have come across the term SEM as well. Confusing SEO with SEM services is quite common. However, there is a fine bleak line between SEO and SEM. Here, we shall break up both the terms for a deeper understanding.

SEO vs. SEM 

The basic difference among digital marketing approaches is that SEO focuses on website optimization to get traffic via organic search results. However, SEM generates traffic from both the organic and paid search results. Hence, it improves the visibility and search ability of a website. Therefore, it won't be wrong to say that SEM is a broader term that encompasses both SEO and PPC (pay per click). 

Main features of SEO 

As mentioned above, SEO is the optimization of a website to get organic traffic and rank among the non-paid results on the search engine result pages. Despite the difference, SEO and SEM aim for the same purpose, higher ranking on SERPs. SEO service categorizes into four subcategories to rank the websites qualifying the Google algorithm.   

On-page SEO

It is the practice where we optimize the website for the keywords popular on search engines; Google & Bing among your target audience. It includes aligning various page elements such as headings, content, title tags, and internal links with these keywords.

Off-Page SEO

The activities that help rank your website on SERPs outside the website fall into the category of off-page SEO. Such activities include utilizing social networking, guest posts, outreaches, forums, brand mentions, etc. In short, it helps the search engines understand the products & services on your website and build the domain authority. 

Technical SEO 

This area of SEO refers to the efforts made to optimize the website architecture. It mainly improves the website for the search engines to crawl, index, and render the website better. Consequently, it helps improve the website's organic ranking.

User interaction signals

Lastly, SEO and SEM coincide practices that include monitoring several elements that define search engine optimization strategy as per a searcher's need. These elements are the signals sent to the search engine by the website user depending upon the quality of his interaction with the website. These signals include the elements such as click-through rate (CTR), time spent on the website, bounce rates, and return-to- SERP, etc. 

Main features of SEM

Providing that SEM services are a broader approach comprising the SEO practices includes all the practices mentioned above. Therefore, here we shall be mentioning some of the SEM features attributed to PPC. 

Quality Score: 

According to the top-notch search engine marketing services experts, quality score is a critically important metric for Google Ads, a unique feature among SEO and SEM. Google analyzes the relevancy of your google ad with someone's search based on certain elements. 

The search engine defines the quality score by analyzing the combination of your landing page quality, the quality score of your Google ad account, and the click-through rates. Furthermore, Google offers discounts for high-quality scores ad n each click. 

Bidding

Paid ads, whether Google ads or Bing ads, are all about bidding on a specific keyword. When someone searches that keyword, the search engine brings up your ad. The higher you bid, the higher ranking on SERPs you will have. Consequently, you will pay whatever amount you have bid when someone clicks on the ad. 

Ad copy

Here the magic of good content writing works. If you write a compelling ad copy that persuades your target audience to click, it means you will have a high CTR. Higher CTR will make your ads fall into the category of good quality score ads. Hence, you can benefit from the discount and pay less for PPC. 

Conversely, if one fails to write up to the mark ads, your quality score will drop down, and it would get expensive respectively.

Results efficiency

Besides all the features mentioned above, SEO and SEM differ in their efficiency. According to the digital marketing experts, you may have to wait a long to get to the SEO results. The waiting time prolongs if your website is new and does not have such backlinks. Statistically, it may take up to 2 years to appear on the first page of the Google search results page, and most of the websites on the first page are more than three years old.  

However, it is not a hard and fast rule to take two years to rank on SERPs. Hiring the best search engine marketing services may reduce the waiting time for results to a minimum. All it takes to witness the SEO results within months is to target long-tail keywords and implement SEO practice at your best. 

Conversely, among SEO and SEM, you can witness the results of your SEM efforts in a shorter period. For example, if you post an ad in the morning, the results will be available as soon as in the evening of the same day in the form of traffic and conversions. However, getting conversions from PPC also needs lots of expertise and experience. Hence, it can take several months to test and optimize the ads for the best positive response. Still, PPC proves to be very efficient in SEM practices than SEO alone. 

Cost

The last point of comparison among both SEO and SEM is the cost. Many are attracted to SEO practices because it is generally considered a source of free website traffic. Well, don't fool yourself into believing it. Undoubtedly, once you reach the number one rank on SERPs, you don't pay any single penny to anyone, but it takes a lot to get there. For example, you must build the domain authority that requires massive regular quality content to reach the top rank.

Further, you have to market that content with email outreach. Unfortunately, you don't have quality SEO tools to find the potential keywords. Consequently, you may have to get a designer, illustrator, and developer on board to run the blog along with SEO practices. So SEO is not completely free at all!

On the other hand, as SEM approach includes PPC, which means paying cash to get traffic. Undoubtedly, contrasting with SEO, even if you are paying for PPC, you will be having live data of your SEM practices. Furthermore, it is considered that if you stop paying for PPC, your traffic from that channel will go down to zero. Hence, there is a bleak line between SEO and SEM and you have to choose wisely.