SEO and SEM?

By : Business Start Up
Published 1st November 2013 |
Read latest comment - 17th December 2013

Hi all,

What's Different between SEO and SEM?. Some person Say SEO is Free Online Promotion and SEM is Payed Online Promotion. Can anyone give me Correct Suggestion.

krishh
Comments
Hi all,

What's Different between SEO and SEM?

2 pieces of the same pie...

Search Engine Optimisation and Search Engine Marketing.

One is optimising via on or off page techniques, the other is pro actively marketing via things such as PPC.

SEO once done (or ongoing) will generate free (organic) traffic, but unless you are savvy yourself, then there is the cost to have this implemented.

Steve Richardson
Gaffer of My Local Services
My Local Services | Me on LinkedIn

SEO and SEM may look more like alphabet soup than important strategic tools, but

Cccamserver

I agree with sjr4x4 that both SEO and SEM are "part of the same pie," but a more accurate description might be that SEO is just a part of SEM. SEO (search engine optimization) is about getting your website to rank highly in the Google results (yes, I know there are other search engines, but Google remains far and away the most widely used).

SEO can involve such things as all content that is on your website, as well as offsite content (including backlinks and citations) that helps to boost the authority of your site in Google.

Other things which would fall under the SEM umbrella but which are not strictly speaking "SEO" include things like pay-per-click advertising (Adwords), local directory listings (Google+ Local), and video (YouTube).

DavidDragon

Interesting how SEO is labelled as 'free' ! IF I paid myself minimum wage and counted the amount of hours it spent on SEO, the number would be huge. But the only investment is time, not moeny - so correct.

Personally I like to run a bit of both, SEO I find important as - its free, but SEM offers SO much more flexibility, I can run offers, turn it on or off when I please, the analytics is much better as I can use reverse proxy to understand which of my keywords generate calls - usually I find that if I am in the PPC section AND the SEO section, I generate more from the seo section... don't know the psychology behind that!

Thanks,
mattylad

Interesting how SEO is labelled as 'free' ! IF I paid myself minimum wage and counted the amount of hours it spent on SEO, the number would be huge. But the only investment is time, not moeny - so correct.

Your absolutely right, time is money unless you work for buttons. I guess a better way of putting it would have been once the investment in SEO has been made, then you can generate free traffic.

SEO once done (or ongoing) will generate free (organic) traffic, but unless you are savvy yourself, then there is the cost to have this implemented.

But agree with you 100% on PPC. Used it for years and still swear by it because it consistently works. Instant results marketing, with instant analytics, allowing you to make changes to a campaign on the fly, whats not to like.

Although interestingly have seen a slow down of spend and conversions ever since Google were forced to put a big obvious bright orange sponsor ad button next to the adwords unit, a couple of weeks ago, which bizarrely seem to have disappeared again, after just having a quick look!

Steve Richardson
Gaffer of My Local Services
My Local Services | Me on LinkedIn

This Thread is now closed for comments