Difference Between SEO And SEM

Before going through the difference between SEO and SEM, let's have some look on the Social Marketing, Because these two terms which we are going to learn or differentiate are the part of Search Marketing.

What is Search Marketing?

Search Marketing is nothing but a process or tactic or technique used to gain traffic and online presence/visibility of the company/individual from the help of various paid and unpaid(organic) efforts.

Search marketing is further classified into two major categories:

1.Search Engine Optimization (SEO) :- SEO is nothing but the process of improving your website to Rank higher or gain visibility in search engine ranking pages. It includes various activities like creating high-quality content, using the best keywords, building backlinks and so on. It's an unpaid(organic) method.

2.Search Engine Marketing (SEM) :- SEM is nothing but the part of search marketing that uses paid techniques to gain visibility in Search Engine Ranking Pages and traffic via these strategies. It includes various activities like setting up Google Ads and optimizing ads, and setting a budget for the placement of the ads.It includes Pay Per Click(PPC) ads too.It's completely paid method

Difference Between SEO and SEM

The main difference between SEO and SEM is that SEO uses organic techniques to get visible in Search Engine Rank Pages, while SEM uses paid techniques. That's why search results appear because SEM techniques will look different from each other on Search Engine Rank Pages. Search results appear because SEM will be identified as an 'add' icon, however search results appear because SEO will not have an icon called 'add' as it is an organic(unpaid) search result.

SEM search results will have special ad extensions while SEO results have snippets.When you do a comparison between SEO and SEM you can see that there will be differences between the appearances of search results. Search results which come under SEM may include add extensions such as callouts, phone numbers and additional links, whereas search results which come under SEO may appear with featured snippets such as answer boxes, list featured snippets and so on.

You need to pay every time whenever a user click on search results which comes under SEM results whereas you pay nothing whenever a user click on the search results comes under SEO results. As we already mentioned SEM is the paid technique of the Search Marketing, you need to pay for its services, on the other hand, SEO is organic technique, hence you are never charged when a user click on SEO(organic) search result.

SEO does not have the ability to select target audiences, whereas SEM has the ability to select a target audience. As we all know, targeting the audience as per your requirements/company's goals is very important. Here in SEM you get an option to select your target audience by assigning various filters like age group, gender, location, income, etc. However, using SEO you cannot specify or set your target audience.

The results of SEM are immediate. However, the results of SEO take time. As we all know, using SEM, we can place ads on search engines, and they start showing on SERPs as soon as you launch a specific campaign. Conversely, SEO requires a lot of time to rank and appear on search engine pages.

SEO is an investment in the future. SEM is only active till you pay for your results to show. As we all know, SEM brings paid traffic to your website, business, it is only active till you pay for your ads to show, as soon as you turn off your ads, you are out of it, your SEM strategy gets over. However, SEO is totally different from SMM, SEO strategy grows and adds more value and gives more results for the future.

The Click-Through Rate(CTR) of SEO is so high when you reach the top of the SERPs as compared to the CTR of SEM. The first few top results of the Search Engine Rank pages(SERP)will definitely have the highest click-through rate by the use of SEO techniques, but if you appear on the lower pages then SEM techniques play its role.

SEO Company In Chennai