What’s the Difference between SEM and SEO?

Are you interested to know the difference between SEM and SEO? Also, what their different roles are in driving traffic to your website? Well, you’re in luck and in the right place…

Here’s a quick presentation on Google Slides with some nice, easy-to-understand graphics that make everything a lot clearer.

Press play or click through the slides below. There’s only 13 of them!

Take a look through the slides and get a clear picture without reading on, or keep reading to see what’s covered in paragraph format…

Online Marketing: Where do SEM & SEO fit in?

Online marketing can be broken down into various different branches. These include social media marketing, email marketing, and search engine marketing (SEM). Basically, SEM is a branch of online marketing and SEO is a sub-branch of that.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

Short definition of SEM:

‘SEM is the marketing of your brand, product or website within search engines in order to gain more impressions and click-throughs.’

Examples of strategies, tools and activities:

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Search Engine Ads (SEA)
• Social Media (YouTube & Twitter are especially important for SEM)
• Online Reviews
• Wikipedia
• Google Specific (MyBusiness, Knowledge Panel, Sitelinks, Position Zero)

SEM is important for when someone searches for your brand, company or product. Good SEM gives a great first impression and improves click-through-rates to your owned media sites or sales platforms.

For a comprehensive guide to SEM, please read ‘What is SEM? Search Engine Marketing Fundamentals’

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is a subset of SEM. It includes all the activities and tools you would use to improve your website and specific pages of your website’s rankings within search engines.

Examples of strategies, tools and activities:

• On-Site or On-Page SEO (everything that can be tweaked on your page to improve SEO. This includes (but not limited to) developing the content, keyword strategy, user experience and speed of the page, and meta-tagging)
• Off-Site or Off-Page SEO (everything that happens away from your page. The main thing here is building links to your page from relevant and authoritative sites)
• Targeted SEO (this is when you are trying to rank for certain target keywords. This is content-driven. You pick the keywords and then develop a content and keyword strategy around that)
• Foundational SEO (this is when you are optimizing your page or website in order to lay the foundations for SEO success. This is when you do some optimizations of your site to improve the speed and user experience and add functionality like AMP (accelerated mobile pages) or schema to improve visibility in search engine results.

SEO is important for branded keywords but it is especially important for your target industry keywords.

‘Ultimately, the most important aspects of SEO are quality of content and user experience on your website. Then you need backlinks from relevant sites.’

If you sprinkle a little stardust on these two things using SEM and SEO strategies, you’ll have a great chance of ranking high and driving traffic to your website.

For bonus content, including a table outlining the differences between SEM and SEO, as well as info on why driving traffic to your site is so important, check out the slides.

SEM & SEO Glossary

Further Research

My SEO Gurus:

• Brian Dean at Backlinko
• Alex Chris at ReliableSoft

Andrew Jackson

Andrew Jackson lives on the North Shore and does SEO and digital marketing for a living. He is passionate about footy, DJing, craft beer, and of course, his family. He is married with 3 lovely daughters.