Search Engine Marketing or Search Engine Optimization

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What is the difference between these two? Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is used to describe the entire practice of using search engine traffic to market goods and services. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the science and art of formatting a website to rank better within the search engine results pages (SERPs). SEO is part of SEM.

SEM includes search engine advertising, and this is an ever import overlooked aspect of Marketing for most organizations. The main obstacle is the cost and the potential negative ROI on advertising expenses. In reality doing an effective Adwords campaign, or any online advertising, is very difficult to manage. To get the best results there needs to be an exhaustive research of all the possible terms used by web surfers interesting in any topic. This is called keyword research. SEM company’s help businesses conduct the research and build list of hundred of keyword combinations, misspellings and phrasings. The key is to find keywords that have traffic with relatively low competition. It is always amazing to see the amount of traffic a misspelled keyword can generate.

Not every keyword is the same either.  Typically the more information typed into the search engine the more interested and more likely the searcher is to make a purchase. For example: If you are interested in buying a guitar you may search for “guitar”, a very competitive term. Once you’ve done a bit of research you may then search for “Fender Eric Clapton Stratocaster”. It is this long tail search that typically results in sales. If you are the advertiser the term “Guitar” you will have a lot of expensive clicks and few purchases, while the phrase “Fender Eric Clapton Stratocaster” will result a lot fewer clicks, but considerably more sales. This is the heart of the SEM. Finding those high converting keywords and setting up keyword advertising to exploit them.

The approach I use with client is to set up web pages based on these long tail keywords and then let the SE slowly improve their rankings, BUT if immediate sales are required then I would advise them to use these same long tail keywords, and combinations, in an Adwords campaign.

All this can be quite complicated and thus is why SEM and SEO firms have become more and more popular during the last 10 years.