Week 3: SEO vs SEM

In digital marketing their are a wide variety of terms used to describe marketing and its tactics. From search engine optimization to social media marketing, there are many different routes and forms businesses could take to get their ad on top. When it comes to marketing a product or service, you will hear many businesses use the terms, "search engine optimization" and "search engine marketing". Although these words sound similar it is important to understand what the difference is and what each term really means.

What is search engine optimization?

Search engine optimization or SEO, mainly focuses on the ranking of your ad and getting your ad to be ranked higher on Google. Search engine optimization is helpful to businesses because since Google is one of the biggest used search engines, it is important for companies to spend time looking for ways to increase their ad ranking to get more traffic to your site. SEO focuses on organic search results which just means non-paid rankings, meaning that an ad is ranked higher due to its content and quality. With this concept, businesses focus on the quality of their ad and get their ad ranked higher by having engaging ads that people will want to click on.

What is search engine marketing?

Search engine marketing, or SEM is similar to search engine optimization due to the fact that it also focuses on unpaid search results. SEM is different from SEO in the sense that search engine marketing also focuses on paid search results. When it comes to getting your ad ranked higher on Google, businesses will pay Google to have their ad ranked higher due to bidding on search terms which is a big part of what search engine marketing is all about. The image below taken from this article that can be found by clicking here, is a great visual that helps explain what the main idea of SEO and SEM is.



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