Most search engines, these days, return two types of results whenever you click Search:  Organic/Natural and Paid. In this article, I am going to explain the difference between SEO and SEM in a simple and easy way.

Understanding The Difference Between SEO And SEM By Their Definitions

In simple words, the results that most users are looking for called the ‘real (Organic/Natural)’ search results (often called ‘SERPs’ for Search Engine Results Pages). And the later one is pure advertising (Paid). Where is how the search engines make their money!

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

SEO is the initials of Search Engine Optimization (Search Engine Optimization) and it is about the optimization of web pages so they have better visibility in the organic “real” search results, that they appear in the first positions when I do a search on certain search engines, usually Google. These are the results I’m talking about When it comes search engine ranking. The rankings of these results are determined by how relevant each of these searcher’s query.

Important: You can’t pay a search engine to give you a high ranking in the natural results. You can only get a high ranking if your content is seen as relevant and important by the search engines.

I can describe it, as an SEO technician works to provide a web page with a structure and content search engines can easily understand. This implies an analysis work, first, to analyze the web page and see which parts of it must be modified, and another strategic part and the generation of a structure and content based on certain keywords, which will be those that users They are looking for the products or services of the company.

The factors that search engines, mainly Google, take into account when positioning a website are very numerous, so I will dedicate an exclusive article to it. But, to clarify a little more what SEO is, let’s see it with an example:

If a client were techradar.com (fictitious name), and one of the keywords I am interested in working with is “best vacuum cleaners”, the job of the SEO technician would be to make the necessary changes to the website so that it appears in the best possible way on the search engine result page, Often called (SERP).

SEM (Search Engine Marketing)

The SEM (Search Engine Marketing or Marketing in Search Engines) are all the marketing actions related to search engines, so it would also include SEO. Pay-per-click campaigns are commonly known by this term, in which the advertiser pays for each click made on the ad on the Internet.

Advertisers pay the search engines to display their ad whenever someone searches for a word that is related to their product or service. These ads look similar to the natural search results, but are normally labelled “Sponsored Links”, and normally take up a smaller portion of the window. The order of these results is determined mostly by how much each advertiser is prepared to pay.

The most common SEM campaigns are called sponsored ads on Google, those that appear with the yellow or green “Ad” label when I perform a search, or Google Shopping ads, for example. Both text and shopping ads can be managed through Google AdWords, the most used tool in the day-to-day life of an SEM manager.

In this case, if I am interested in selling my products through the search “buy vacuum cleaners”, I’d create a campaign in Google AdWords, with my ads, a series of keywords, among which I would have “buy vacuum cleaners”. And if my bid is one of the highest for this specific keyword, I will appear among the first 4 ads. The part on the right belongs to Google Shopping. To appear in this place, I will have to upload the product feed to Google Merchant, a Google tool that allows me to sell my products through the search engine.

However, when people use search engines, they normally pay a lot more attention to the natural results than the paid results because they know these results are more relevant (and they know the “Sponsored Links” are simply ads) which is why you need to understand the difference between SEO and SEM, and effectively implement the one best suites to business strategy and budget.

Which Is More Effective?

According to the 99 Firms Search Engine Statistics, For most industries, the natural results are significantly more effective:

• 89% of people click on the no.1 result, 33% on no.2, 17% on no.4, 17% on no.5, 6% on no.7 and 0% on no.8
• 94% of people see the no.1 result, 94% see no.2
• Only 50% see the no.1 paid listing (PPC/paid ads) and only 40% see the no.2 paid listing
• Organic results get clicked 8½ times as often as paid listings – excluding search results that have no paid ads

Why It Is Important To Know The Difference Between SEO And SEM?

• The Internet is the world’s second most commonly used medium after television
• 93% of users worldwide use search engines to find websites
• Search engines are the way most people (85%) find new sites, and the way most businesses find unknown sources for products and services
• Nearly 93% of all web traffic comes through search engines.
• Google processes 2 trillion searches a year.
• 86% of online Americans have purchased a product online
• For every $1 that a business spends on Google Search and Ads, it makes $8 in profit.
• Google’s 2018 ad revenue amounted to over $116 billion.
• 46% of all searches are linked to something local.
• The top million keyword queries account for 25% of all Google searches.
• Marketers that combine organic SEO and PPC ads see 25% more clicks and 27% greater profits.

Understanding the importance and the difference between SEO and SEM, you’ll be able to effectively incorporate them within your business to business