SEO is the act of improving the visibility of a website’s outcomes on specific search engines through unpaid forms of online advertising. It is used to increase traffic to a website by improving its rank on the search engine pages.
SEM is the act of improving the visibility of a website outcomes on specific search engines through paid advertisements. It includes Search Engine Optimization, contextual advertising, AdSense, social networking, pay-per-click (PPC), AdWords, and so on.
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| SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. | SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing. |
| It is a part of SEM. | It is used for traffic generation and is a superset of SEO. |
| Results will take time to appear. | Immediate result. |
| Suitable for low-budget companies. | Suitable for big-budget companies. |
| The Click-Through Rate (CTR) of SEO is higher than SEM. | The Click-Through Rate (CTR) of SEM is lower than SEO. |
| Traffic potential is unlimited. | Traffic potential is limited depending on the budget. |
| It is inexpensive. | It is expensive. |
| Long-term benefits. | Short-term benefits. |
| SEO improves the visibility of the website. | SEM improves the sales of a small business. |
| Competition is lesser due to the requirement for organic content. | Competition is higher in the targeted areas. |
| The SEO search result doesn’t target any audience. | SEM search result targets the selected audience. |
| Example: Backlinks creation | Example: Google Ads |
Interesting Facts:
- Only 30% of new businesses state they use SEO for marketing. A simple 12% use PPC promotions(TNW News).
- 47% of digital marketers state SEO is one of their best strategies but 39% also recognize it as one of the most difficult.(TNW News)