Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is one of the many different techniques used for Internet Marketing. Specifically, it is a form of Internet Marketing that tries to increase the visibility of web pages in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the act of carrying out activities within and outside of your website to ensure a better placement in search engine results for your keywords.
By these definitions, SEO is just one of the things that you can do for SEM. In other words, SEO is a subset of SEM. Other SEM methods are Paid Inclusion, Traditional Ads (Paid Placement), Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising, etc.. It should be mentioned that SEO is a required part of any successful SEM campaign. The other methods genarally offer acceleration or shorter term boosts, but SEO is the method most responsible for a long term and stable solution.
Having said this, SEM and SEO are much more than just paying for ads or optimizing content on the website. You need to continuously measure and monitor the returns from your activities to see if your methods are effective. Search Engines are continuously changing their algorithms and a method that works today may not work tomorrow. A sufficiently comprehensive SEM campaign may include:
- SEO - as mentioned, a good SEM campaign doesn’t even start without SEO.
- Search Engine and Directory Submissions – there needs to be a complete process which does this on a regular basis. Although a lot of this would be covered under SEO as well.
- Paid Inclusion - With the major exception of Google, search engines have paid inclusion options. This allows your site to be indexed on a regular schedule (though this does not guarantee placement)
- Paid Placement and PPC – this is paying for ads on various ad channels such as Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, WidgetBucks, etc.
- ROI, Performance Monitoring, and Reporting – as mentioned, you need to have a way of correlating your efforts and expenditure with the return that you are getting. There are many ways of doing this (e.g. Google Analytics lets you interface your AdWords and your Google Checkout account with your Analytics account. This lets you measure your return per dollar spent on Adwords).
SEM requires a much larger discussion which we can do over future posts, as does SEO. But for most purposes the image below summarizes the two:
As the image illustrates, SEO is something that gets you placed better in the “organic” results – the primary search listings, in the midle of your screen – of a Search Engine, while SEM (other than SEO) gets traffic to your website usually through paid means (including, but not limited to, the sponsored ads search engines display on your screen).
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