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Search Engine Optimization vs Search Engine Marketing: What’s The Difference?

Introduction:

SEM and SEO are both vital to your brand’s online presence. To ensure organic traffic and awareness on search engines, SEM and SEO services are necessary to include in business websites.

What is Search Engine Optimization?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and does exactly what it says, optimizing your page to appear better in search engine pages. By optimizing your website by incorporating keywords and links, you can increase the organic visitors to your website and online stores on search engines like Google.

What Are Search Engine Marketing Services?

Much like SEO, search engine marketing services are also used to increase a website’s visibility, but unlike technical configuration, SEM involves digital advertising. The most common search engine marketing strategies include PPC advertising, content marketing, etc. SEO is a subset of Search engine marketing, however, SEM focuses on paid and organic visitors.

Search Engine Optimization vs Search Engine Marketing

SEO key features and overview

Unlike how SEM involves paid and organic search, SEO only focuses on updating and optimizing a page or store for organic traffic. SEO involves several practices for optimization, here’s a few of them

On-page SEO:

On-page SEO gives you control over optimizing and configuring your website. From uploading blogs and incorporating keywords to adding title tags, and updating headings, on-page SEO is the easiest way to improve page speed and get more visibility through search result pages.

Off-page SEO:

It involves the SEO that happens for your website on other pages, by executing outreach, optimizing social media sites, sharing media, and adding your site’s links. Off-page SEO does not allow complete control but does to a limit.

Technical SEO:

By improving the speed of your page, and internal links, you can enhance the technical aspects of Search Engine Optimization. This helps search engines crawl your website and understand it better to help it rank better on result pages.

Combining these three SEO practices, allows you to tell Search Engine Engines exactly what you need to portray with text, images, and links. Additionally, this shows visitors, that you’re a tech-savvy business that stays updated and knows what it’s doing.

Search Engine Marketing Services Overview:

SEM is a broader term encompassing SEO and other tactics that allow paid and organic visitors to locate pages. This includes:

Search engine marketing strategies also involve:

Account structure:

Your account structure helps your company organize the advertisement strategy and optimize your budget.

Bids:

A bid determines an estimate of how much your business will pay PPC advertisement. Google Ads, offers automatic bidding that can help you accomplish your individual goals while staying within your budget.

Quality Score:

A Quality Score is specific to Google Ads, it represents the quality and reliability of your advertisement. A high-quality Score equals better ad placements and lower costs.

Search engine optimization vs search engine marketing: how long to see results?

How long it takes to see results vary greatly among both. Since SEO focuses on organic traffic it takes time, and in some cases, it can take up to two years to rank on Google's first results page. It may be surprising to some, but most of the top-ranking results on the first pages were established three years ago.

But it doesn't automatically imply that you also have to wait for two years to rank your website. If you incorporate long-tail keywords and invest in the SEO best practices you may see outcomes within a few months!

Since PPC is paid, you may start seeing results right away. So quick that an ad released in the evening equals new visitors and conversions by night! But it may mean something other than the best for your ROI, and even with PPC and other search engine marketing strategies, it may take months to get a positive ROI.

Conclusion

Among search engine optimization vs search engine marketing, SEO can possibly be free, if you do it yourself, but will yield little results. For effective SEO you have to invest in some tools or contact a digital marketing company for the best results. On the other hand, for a PPC campaign, you'll be paying every time someone clicks your ad. So it may get more expensive than SEO, however, you know at the same time that PPC is more likely to yield results.

At Creative’s Genie, we offer both SEM and SEO services at affordable pricing. Contact us now for a free quote and we’ll help you decide which is best for you.

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