SEO vs. SEM
SEO vs. SEM – what’s the difference? These two acronyms stand for Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing, respectively. Both can have a profound impact on your client pipeline. To start, we’ll look at search engine optimization or SEO.
SEO is the practice of constructing your web content in a way that appeals to search engines, such as Google.com, Yahoo.com or Bing.com. These search engines send out what are commonly referred to as spiders, robots or crawlers, which are basically programs designed to scour the world wide web for content and then ‘index’ it on their servers (make a record of the content and its subject matter for future search results). This way, when someone goes to Google.com, for example, and searches for say… “used cars for sale”, Google’s search engine will scan its indexed web content for any pages it deemed relevant to that search phrase. If your site’s content is repetitious with the use of certain relevant ‘keywords’ or keyword phrases (words or groups of words relevant to the subject matter of your site), then your site will appear higher up in results. The more relevance the spiders found on your site’s pages, and then subsequently indexed, the further up in search results your site can be expected to appear.
There is a wide variety of other practices that lend to one’s page displaying higher in search results. Search engine spiders look for links within your content and the relevance of those links. They also look at other sites that link to your site, which further contributes to the optimization. Fresh, new content is also a key factor in optimization, which is why applications such as Facebook, Twitter and blogs aid tremendously in optimization, as the content published is always new. In whatever way, shape or form you decide to optimize your site, it ultimately all comes down to keywords, relevance and links.
SEM, or Search Engine Marketing, is a way to bypass all of these practices and get your page to appear at the top of search results, via a paid placement. If you look at the accompanying image to this article, you’ll see a typical Google search results page. Note the two areas outlined by the red borders. These are paid search results. Google and other search engines offer the opportunity to bid (yes, as in an auction) on those placements based on the desired keyword(s) or keyword phrases you’d like your site to appear in relation to. Thus, if someone searched for “used cars for sale”, and you’ve submitted bids to appear in the paid placement results for that search phrase, you can expect to appear at the very top of the results if you had the highest bid. The highest bidders appear on the top of the page above all other results. The rest appear on the right sidebar. You can always tell which are paid listings, as they’re typically contained within a slightly off-colored box appropriately labeled ‘Ads’. Bidders have the option to pay a cost per click (CPC) or for the cost per 1,000 impressions (CPM). CPC is what you’ll pay when someone clicks on your ad link. Therefore, you only pay when your ad is actually clicked. CPM isn’t concerned with whether or not you get clicks. It merely ensures your ad will display at least 1,000 times in relevant search results.
Back to SEO for a moment… if you look again at the image, you’ll notice additional results under the red border-enclosed ads at the top of the page. These are known as organic search results, and are the result of effective SEO. Although you don’t have to pay the search engine (i.e. Google) to appear in these placements, you do have to optimize your site and other online content to be relevant, which takes time, effort and specialized knowledge of Google’s and other search engine’s mindbogglingly-complex algorithms.
That is SEO and SEM in a nutshell. Volumes of data and insight are available on the subject and this article is merely an attempt to simplify these terms for the less familiar individual. If you have any questions about SEO or SEM, shoot us an email or call anytime. You can connect{@}grayspectrum.com or call the office number on our main site.
-Benjamin Gray
Principal, Gray Spectrum
