How many times have you heard something like this: “We provide both SEO and SEM services”, “I do both SEO and SEM”, or some other variation of the same song?
I’ve heard it thousand times. And each time it makes me cringe inside. Surprisingly many times this phrase was uttered by people who were supposed to be SEO/SEM experts. Yet this phrase has no more sense than if a person says “I am an expert in both Online Marketing and Email Marketing”.
Email Marketing is one of the components of Online Marketing. If you’re an expert in Online Marketing than you should be an expert in Email Marketing, SEM, Media Marketing, Affiliate Marketing and other online traffic generation methods. If somebody says that s/he is an expert in both Online Marketing and Email Marketing that makes me wonder how deep her/his expertise really is in the subject matter.
Now let’s get back to SEO and SEM phrases I mentioned at the beginning of this post. To put it politely, all those phrases are perfect examples of total and ultimate nonsense. Here is why.
What is SEO? SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. In other words, it’s an art or science (I’ve heard it both ways) of optimizing a site in such a way that it ranks highly in the organic search results for desirable keywords.
What is SEM? SEM is an abbreviation of Search Engine Marketing – an entire industry dedicated to driving traffic to a desired object through search engines and search-affiliated networks.
If you look at any major search engine, you see two different types of results displayed on search engine result pages for any popular keyword – paid results and organic results. Organic results are generated based on complex ranking algorithms which differ from search engine to search engine. Rankings for any particular site could be improved through thoughtful and skillful SEO campaigns.
Paid Search Marketing (or Paid Search Optimization, if you prefer) is responsible for the placement and optimization of paid results. Paid results could be displayed not only on SERPs (search engine results pages), but also on any other site that agrees to be a part of search network and displays relevant advertisement.
To make this concept a bit clearer, let’s look at Google, since it’s a world-dominating search engine. Google offers Google Adwords program for advertisers and Google AdChoice program for publishers (formerly known as Google AdSense).
Any website’s owner who enrolls in AdChoice program, agrees to display advertisement on his/her site for a share of advertisement revenue, so it becomes a part of search-affiliated network.
Through Google Adwords, advertiser may choose to display ads on Google SERPs only, both on Google SERPs and on Google –affiliated search network or on all Google properties.
Aside from search engine and search network, other worth-mentioning Google properties include Google places, Gmail, Google mobile network and Google social networks. So the task for paid search marketing expert is to figure out how to use company’s budget to get higher conversions and ultimately higher ROI by optimizing ads and landing pages and testing ad placement on all those properties.
Of course, the train doesn’t stop there. Both Bing and Yahoo have similar programs that could be used to extend company’s exposure through paid advertisement even further. As you can see, SEM consists of SEO and Paid Search Marketing. Yet in real world Paid Search Marketing is often confused with SEM. So when people say that they “do both SEO and SEM” what they really mean is that they “implement both SEO and Paid Search Marketing strategies”.
It’s OK to say that you’re SEO/SEM expert (essentially meaning that you’re an expert in both organic and paid search marketing). But it’s not OK to say that you’re providing both SEO and SEM services, since if you’re providing SEM services, you provide SEO services by default.
Hope this post helped you to clarify the confusion between SEO and SEM.
As always we are looking forward to read your comments and suggestions.
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