SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing. Knowing where each one comes from, we can intuit the differences between them, which we are going to explain below.
What is SEM in digital marketing?
SEM are all the marketing actions that are carried out in a search engine, known as the set of strategies and techniques that, through promotions, help us to improve the visibility of websites from search engines. Basically, SEM consists of creating paid advertisements with keywords so that when someone searches the internet with one of these keywords, the page that is doing the SEM comes up first in the search.
Normally the Google Ads or Microsoft Advertising platforms are used, plus Google Ads, which is present in Google Shopping, Gmail, Google Maps, YouTube and all the pages that use Google Ads in their advertisements, which are millions of pages. In the end, the aim of this strategy is to quickly give visibility to our website, from the moment the campaigns are configured and we bid to go out, having the possibility of our ads appearing on pages with similarities to what we advertise or for things that the user has previously searched for and detects that they may be interested in our products.
What is SEO in digital marketing?
In an SEO campaign, these are the actions that are carried out on a web page so that search engines prioritise it and that it appears in the first positions in search engines when certain keywords are used, without using any payment method, as opposed to what happens with Google Ads.
Any website can appear in search engines if you search for its name/brand in particular. But if you search for content or a general query it will be much more difficult to appear on the first page of the search.
A website properly optimised for SEO has all the chances of ranking higher in organic results than a website that has not been done with SEO knowledge, which basically amounts to none.
So now that we know what each term means we can see the differences more easily. In SEM you pay to be positioned in the search engine so we can assume a direct cost per visit and on the other hand in SEO there is no direct cost per visit as you don't have to pay. We say direct cost because it is directly related to the visits of the search engine and in this case SEO does not have it but to obtain a correctly optimised page for SEO it is necessary to have an expert which costs money so it does have a cost and it is not "free" as people usually think. So SEO and SEM positioning is done in different ways to achieve a similar result which is to give visibility to our website.
