09
SEO vs. SEM
Filed Under (Uncategorized) by abutt on 09-01-2012
Tagged Under : Confusion, Constituents, Cutthroat Competition, Elements, Elements Of A Website, Google, Google Yahoo, Marketing Affiliate Marketing, Marketing Research, Marketing Strategy, Media Promotion, Optimization Seo, Pay Per Click, Reputation Management, Search Engine Advertising, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engines And Directories, Search Optimization, Submission, Visibility
In recent years, internet marketing has become one of the most important elements of a company's overall marketing strategy. With every product and service facing a cutthroat competition in the market, companies can ill-afford to overlook the importance of their customers online and not have an effective strategy in place to reach them. Within the online medium there are now quite a few channels and techniques that the companies can use to reach their constituents. These include Email Marketing, Affiliate Marketing, Social Media Promotion and, probably the most important, Search Engine Marketing (SEM). There's a reason why SEM is so vital for a company to focus on - most websites relying on e-commerce get almost 65% of their traffic from search engines. For content-based websites, the percentage of people coming from search engines can be more than 85%. SEM is the approach that incorporates all the techniques including search engine optimization (SEO) which are used for attracting traffic from different search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing etc. Confusion arises when people merge the two terms and employ them interchangeably. According to marketing research and practice, however, the difference between SEM and SEO is quite clear.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is a much broader concept than Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEM covers all the activities that a company uses to attract traffic through search engines. SEO, therefore, is only a component of SEM. Other components of Search Engine Marketing (SEM) include search engine advertising such as pay per click, paid submission to search engines and directories, as well as reputation management in search engines. SEO, on the other hand, focuses on improving the website's visibility in organic search results alone. The goal here is to allow the search engines to find the website and rank it high against different keywords. When people talk about the two terms, SEO and SEM, together, they're referring to SEO as the process of improving a website's visibility in organic search results while the SEM, in this context, refers to contextual advertising, paid placement and paid inclusion etc.
As part of a website or a company's online marketing campaign, both SEO and SEM have their own advantages. SEM, for example, allows companies to advertise their websites or products using several keywords, delivering immediate traffic. Most importantly, it gives them the ability to scale it up or down whenever they want. SEO, on the other hand, focuses on appearing in natural listings and is, therefore, a more stable way of attracting traffic to a website. In most cases, it also costs less than the other SEM techniques. However, it takes longer for SEO to start delivering traffic to a website, and usually it's possible to be competitive only for a handful of keywords, especially when it comes to the more popular ones. Paid listings are most often created manually and the way they're structured usually represents a responsiveness and sensitivity to the situation with regard to the consumer’s intent. Search engine optimization, on the other hand, is a source of information generated algorithmically and is, therefore, usually unskewed by any bias.
