SEO Vs SEM: What’s The Difference And Which One To Choose?

The major difference between Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is the way to attract online traffic to a website for engagement, prospecting, and much more.

So, the way to attract online traffic for SEO is from organic search, whereas SEM gets it from organic and paid search.

Now, according to Statista and Backlinko,

“Google currently has over 85% of the search engine market and the #1 result in Google gets approximately 32% of all clicks”

This creates a 49% of marketers reporting to be inclined to SEO, that is organic search optimization of their business which has the best ROI of any marketing channel.

And why wouldn’t it be!!

“Google processes over 8.5 billion searches per day”

This makes 40,000 searches in a second and amounts to a 1.2 trillion every year and paid Ads are at the top of the first page SERPs as shown in the screenshot below.

So, in this blog, you are going to learn everything that you need to know about SEO and SEM difference that may or may not make you decide which of them is suitable for your digital marketing strategy.

Let’s get started.

What Are SEO And SEM?

Nowadays, the trickiest terms are used to promote the digital market’s discovery and inventions for better marketing strategies as well as customer attraction to improve your business’s online visibility.

These discoveries and inventions have led to more acronyms and initializations than you can think of, for example,

CSS, HTML, CPC, KPIs.   

Taking these terms into consideration the need for learning every bit of information about the marketing strategy that you would be applying to your domain optimization becomes much more important.

Here are some extensively used acronyms when digital marketing is applied.

But we are going to focus on the first two SEO and SEM marketing because it is not a bizarre idea that even the expert professional wouldn’t mix them up.

As the most common mistakes happen when what’s the difference between SEO & SEM is actively avoided with a misconception that SEO is a part of SEM because it becomes a different concept after circa 2001.

So, don’t feel bad if you have mixed them up at one point or another, as this happens all the time. Straighten out the fundamentals of what is SEM and SEO moving forward.

SEO

So, starting with SEO what does it stand for?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and is the practice to rank your website on search engines by targeting organic traffic. 

This traffic is directed from search engine rankings to your website and is called organic traffic as it has not been attained by any paid advertisements.

So, SEO is a process of improving your website to generate traffic through keyword research, using competitor’s analysis to your business’s advantage, and other On-page, Off-page, and Technical SEO techniques shown in the image below.

So, SEO uses the organic method to get visibility on SERPs that improves rankings of your business website and catches the eyes of your online targeted traffic.

SEM

SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing and poses the importance of knowing what SEM stands for which is to enhance your business.

But how?

Well, SEM is more about the paid market that requires a budget and would make search engines and other advertising platforms money by promoting your business there as shown in the picture below.

Google has an organized advertising platform named Adwords, Bing has Bing Ads, and Yahoo has Yahoo Gemini.

These platforms, in marketing your business, can help with SEM best practices as well as building a system framework to get more traffic than the one that stands with no framework.

So, in a general view, SEM uses paid methods to get visibility on searches which is done by advertising on search engines as well as platforms that have concentrated traffic on it.

This major tool of difference somehow creates the discussion of SEO vs. SEM and so let’s discuss what’s the difference between SEO & SEM thoroughly.

Search Engine Marketing Vs Search Engine Optimization

As we are introduced to the fundamentals of what is SEM and SEO, it is time that we address functions in both of these core areas, SEO and SEM, of the digital marketing strategy.

For the general directory, the SEO presents an exclusiveness to organic businesses received through the optimization efforts whereas SEM, simply put, is paid for efforts such as advertisements, influencers, etc.

When you are getting confused about the SEM and SEO differences, it feels like the year 2001, when most SEOs would be searching for a term for paid business efforts.

But with the increased advertising opportunities online, many marketers preferred SEM, the paid search, or the PPC marketing technique.

Take a look at the commonalities of driving traffic and putting informed strategies when it comes to what is SEO and SEM 

Also, some SEO and SEM differences in the tools used to drive this traffic and promote visibility online which take organic and paid methods respectively as shown in the figure below.

What’s The Difference Between SEO & SEM

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization but instead of as the name suggests, the improvement process is not for search engines directly.

But because Google is user-centric, the optimization is implemented on websites and content to create relevance, accessibility, and direct online searchers to your business and get prospecting future customers.

The figure below concludes the position of the paid search results that is SEM and Organic search results which are SEOs that are finance-free but just use regular optimization to get analyzed by Google bit and ranked.

And, some of the main SEO and SEM difference are,

Paid/Organic Marketing strategy

SEO is a finance-free relationship between your website and its content with Google which makes it organic whereas SEM is a paid/ financial relationship with Google.

Regular Updates

SEM strategies are announced clearly by search engines.

Here are some SEM strategies that were included and updated as per the Google algorithm such as adding AdWords in the top searches of SERP in 2000, and in 2006 it was added to the bottom of SERP.

In the above historical representation of algorithm updates, you can see various On-page and Off-page SEO updates such as Sitelinks added to the top of the SERP, visual elements added to SERPs, Featured Snippet introduced, and others.

And according to a report by Hubspot,

“Updating and republishing old blog posts with new content and images can increase organic traffic by as much as 106%”

Either the content and SEO can increase your organic traffic by 106% or may cost sites to lose their position on the SERPs ranking especially for a major update like Snippets because this piece of information is a vital metric used by crawlers.

But, unfortunately, they are released just a few hours before the actual update is made by the search engines.

Visibility Of Your Business

SEM strategy gives direct visibility on the first page of SERPs

It focuses on using SEO strategies along with paid ones such as PPC advertising to get expected organic and paid traffic to your site and a return on investment much faster than the SEO as shown in the graph below. 

SEO applied to a website, as shown in the graph above, would create a constantly increasing ROI and takes 6 months or more to get overall visibility online and ranking position on the first page of SERPs at an estimated 3 years.

And so, to get results as early as 4-6 months, you can target low-competition keywords that are much more relevant to your target customers to make conversions in the future and earn revenue.

Read More: 8 Amazing SEO Strategies To Build Your Brand

SEM Can Drive Immediate Results Vs Seo Takes Time

With the targeted keywords applied to the Ad optimization, a searchers query would directly reveal your advertisement and promote offers and other elements of your products and services needed by the target audience.

SEO has content, local SEO, On-page SEO, Off-page SEO, and technical SEO whereas SEM is simply dependent on which search engine or platform is used to get paid slots for advertisements.

Looking at paid search ads Google provides Google’s Adwords, Bing uses Bing Ads, and so on the search engine tools as shown in the data below.

As you know SEO uses all the weapons in its armory to succeed in the digital arena, it does take time to get succeeding numbers as well as results.

SEO Adds Value Over Time

SEO is a slow process as compared to SEM but adds value to your business online by giving ROIs of the SEO applied.

This makes SEO all about getting cumulative results through analyzed, indexed, and ranked content of your website based on core web vital and search engine metrics that are used by crawlers.

The cumulative core web vitals assessment uses search engine’s metrics as a base to assess and rank a website or show whether your website clears on all required metrics which is PASSED in the data given below. 

Meaning if one of the vital elements is failing, it doesn’t mean that your website would become invisible immediately. 

According to Databox reports,

“70% of marketers see SEO as more effective than PPC”

According to SearchEngineJournal,

SEM is less trusted to get expected results as 49% of marketers have reported that organic search has the best ROI of any marketing channel.

Because for SEM, it is the exact opposite!!

That is, when SEM investment is stopped, your website’s content may become invisible immediately because the unpaid advertisement or stopped financial flow has not been able to get the organic ranking for your business.

Testing Strategies

SEO is a cumulative strategy that builds over 4 to 6 months or more because it includes core web vitals that are user-centric and requires trial and tested elements to catch the eyes of users. 

From SEO vs SEM marketing, the organic search optimization marketing strategy hauls more time to let the elements and metrics of Google work collaboratively to achieve rank on SERPs and revenue from conversations as shown in the A/B testing below.

Here, the Variation A of a content page converted only 20% of the users into customers whereas Variation B of the same web content gets a 60% of conversion rate.

So, for sure Variation B of the content page would be your choice for its high conversions. Now, think of these tests to be done on every platform (social media platform) and search engines.

You see, the cumulative elements of SEO at work here are many and So is not easily done, but requires fresh data from the ever-changing algorithm.

The SEO first starts with keyword optimization in content, technical SEO of the site, and other inventive updates like Mobile optimization are presented in the graph below.

Hence, it takes up testing many SEO best practices and deciding which ones would help you achieve your business goals.

So, testing SEO requires expertise that is built over time and is in reality a time-consuming activity. 

Whereas, SEM is easier to test and refine as it involves:

a) Doing keyword research and finding what your target users are searching for.

b) Setting the amount of payment-per-click and bidding for the exact amount you want to pay for them.

c) Creating Ads is like creating SEO content and so, it must be able to compel users to click them and attract them to your website. 

d) Targeting audience for getting prospects must be chosen by building a profile of the audience that should see your campaign.

These SEM best practices are trialed and tested easily and just require a limited strategy for testing SEM advertisements for a website.

What To Choose: SEO Vs. SEM

SEM, which are search engine’s paid tools such as Google Ads is a better and smart investment until you step up your SEO efforts and start getting actual organic traffic.

You could sum up the finest marketing plan for your company in two words: “it depends.”

Yes. It depends.

Here are the four criteria on which the decision between search engine marketing vs search engine optimization depends.

Your Website’s Current Performance

If you have caught up with your SEO strategy and built up a framework, you have acquired a customized system to reach an audience online.

Here, the SEM would provide additional visibility to your strengthened organic visibility. And the major part of your customized system in SEO is driven by changing Google algorithm or even your competitors.  

So check your reputation online and know your real-time ranking on SERPs to decide whether SEO needs more improvement or SEM/ PPC is needed for additional traffic.

Visitors’ Data Owned And Required

We know that SEO is labored to capture more visitors and less the data about them but a good SEM could proficiently provide you with more effective and active data regarding the target audience.

Running PPC campaigns through dashboards of search engines Analytics can get you much more acquired clicks, impressions, sessions, and engagement than the SEO campaigns for a new start-up or a 4-month-old small business.

This data then can be used for tracking trends and attracting new target customers on the digital platforms.

Take for example if your website requires to put forth its brand awareness in the minds of online traffic you would require data regarding the best social media engagement platforms as shown in the bar graph below

Here, as you can see that Instagram and YouTube are the best platforms for Social Media Campaign as it gets more watch time than others.

Margin Or Budget: Low/High

When you are analyzing high click costs with low margins, it is foolish to even think about adding SEM to your marketing strategy which will cost you a lot taking into consideration your website’s quality score and rank.

The SEM/PPC campaign can cost you less only if your quality score is high which is accomplished by regular SEO audits, and improvements.

So that you have to pay less for a better quality score as shown by Sam in comparison to the high amount on Mary and Pat in the following image.

With the calculations dependency cleared, know that if your business has a tight budget, it won’t make sense to run SEM rather stick to SEO.

What Are Your  Goals

If you want your website to drive traffic immediately to your website, SEM is the best option for your brand’s exposure, sales, or just awareness of online traffic.

But if your goal is to get a long-term stable growth, it is the best advice to implement SEO strategies and gain statistics of compounding value and lifetime value customers.

Conclusion

Hopefully, this article provided you with enough data regarding the differences between SEO and SEM, but if you are still a bit confused, SEO is an unpaid but time-consuming strategy used by marketers to get long-term growth.

SEM is all about paying the search engine for adding visibility to your website to get immediate results in less time but with more cost as it is called pay-per-click (PPC).

Now, for a tight margin of investment, it is smart to just focus on using SEO and enhancing your website for search engine crawlers who have user-centric algorithms that give promising long-term development and visibility.

But, you can get the best of both worlds by utilizing their elements and making them part of your digital marketing strategy to give you an upper hand on features from both SEM and SEO.