The difference between SEO and SEM is simply that Search Engine Optimization is part of Search Engine Marketing or Search Marketing as it is widely known. Both processes aim in increasing visibility in search engines.

SEO is about optimizing your website to get higher rankings in the organic search results while SEM goes beyond SEO. It involves other methods that can get you search engine traffic like PPC advertising.

SEO vs SEM

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

For the purpose of doing a comparison between SEO and SEM, it is important to start with the definition of SEO, so that it is clear for everyone what the difference between the two is.

What is SEO?

SEO is the process of optimizing your website for the purpose of getting free traffic from search engines.

SEO is important because an optimized web site is easily understood by search engine crawlers and this increases the chances of ranking higher in SERPS (search engine results pages).

What are the main components of SEO?

There are 3 main pillars of SEO: technical SEO, on-site SEO, and off-site SEO.

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Technical SEO refers to the process of optimizing your website for the crawling and indexing phase. With technical SEO you ensure that search engines can crawl and index your website without any problems.

On-Site SEO are rules you can apply on individual pages and content so that they optimized for specific keywords.

For example, you need to have optimized titles, good descriptions, well-formatted URLs, optimized headings (H1, H2), alt text for images and many more.

You can read the comprehensive SEO Tutorial for beginners, to get a good idea of how you can optimize your website for search engines.

Off-site SEO refers to the process of getting references (backlinks) from other websites for the purpose of increasing your web site’s trust in the eyes of search engines.

For beginners, this may be confusing but try to think about it like a ranking system where the website that has the most references, ranks higher.

References, in this case, are links coming from other web sites to your site. That is also the reason why off-site SEO is referred to as link building.

To avoid any misunderstandings, it’s not only a matter of how many links you have pointed to your website but also from where these links are coming (and a number of other factors).

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

Search Engine Marketing is over and above SEO but it’s only a subset of your overall Digital Marketing Strategy.

The diagram below shows the relationship between Digital Marketing, Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and SEO.

SEM in Digital Marketing

As you can see above, there are many more ways to increase your…

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