If you’re wondering what the difference between SEO vs SEM is, you’re not alone. These are mostly marketing terms that the majority of business owners aren’t necessarily familiar with. We’ll not only explain what each one is but we’ll also explain what each one’s good for, who should use each, the proper time to use them in your business, and what results you should expect from them.
But for those in a rush…
What is the difference between SEO & SEM?
SEO: Search Engine Optimization. It’s the process of creating content, building links, and optimizing your site so that you show up when people are searching for products and services that you offer. The benefit of SEO is that it’s considered “organic” traffic. You don’t have to pay for ads and the visitors, leads, and sales keep pouring in.
SEM: Search Engine Marketing. It’s buying ads on search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. This is where you use Google Ads to essentially buy your way to the top of search engines. The benefit is that it’s quick. If you have the money, you can be number one today. The down sides are that you lose your visitors when you stop spending money, anyone can out-bid you and remove you from the top, it’s expensive, and most people scroll right past the ads.
Lot’s of people say that SEM is a “paid strategy” and SEO is “organic” which implies that it’s free traffic. But unless you have the time and expertise to perform SEO, it’s not free. You have to pay a company to perform your SEO which costs money.
We find lot’s of our clients have paid SEO companies that haven’t performed well for them and so they’re reluctant to hire anyone else. However, you’re likely hired a low priced, fly-by-night company that didn’t really have a reputation to protect.
If you’re in this situation now, spend the extra money to hire a quality SEO and SEM service. You should also brush up on the basics so that you know what the monthly reports they’re giving you actually mean.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Overview
We’re partial to search engine optimization. SEO is made up of several parts and it’s constantly evolving with the Google algorithm updates that roll out almost every day. It’s three main parts consist of on-page, off-page, and technical. Below we’ll explain what each of these are.
On-Page SEO
On-page is the process of optimizing each page on your website. It sounds in-depth, and it is. Especially if you have a large website. With on-page, you look at what terms your page is showing up for (you can find this info in Google Search Console) and then add terms that you’re getting lots of impressions but few clicks for.
There are quite a few steps to on-page SEO done proper so we’ll bullet point the major ones for you here:
- Look at Google search suggestions and add relevant subtopics to your page.
- Look at the top 5 competitors that are outranking you for that pages primary keyword. Notice what subtopics they’re covering and add those to your page.
- Pay attention to the keyword density on their pages. You can use a free chrome extension like SEO Quake to see what words they’re using and the densities.
- Look at the number of headings, images, videos, etc. they’re using and add at least that many of each to your page.
- Add alt text to every image on your page.
- Adjust your content length so that it’s similar to the top competitors.
- Ensure your page matches the search intent of the viewer.
- Shorten your URL so that it’s short and includes your keywords. Keep dates and stop words out of your URL.
- Make sure you have well written titles and meta descriptions.
Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO is the process of doing things off of your site which can effect your rankings in Google. We’ll highlight the big one’s here:
- Local citations – these are the mentions of your brands name, address, and phone number around the internet.
- Backlinks – these are other websites that link to your website.
- Social Signals – this is people sharing your content and talking about it.