What is SEM?
As written above, SEM means Search Engine Marketing. SEM is a common term for SEO and SEA, where SEO is search engine optimisation and SEA is search engine advertising - for example Google Ads. Let's take a closer look at SEO and SEA respectively.
What is SEO?
This type of SEM work does not require the creation of an ad. Instead, this part is about many different factors that you have worked on, on your own website, and outside of your website, all of which can contribute to your landing pages ranks higher in search results.
When you work with SEO on your own website, you are on-page SEO, and conversely, if you're doing SEO outside your website, that's off-page SEO.
Your on-page SEO work includes writing SEO-friendly text on your website's landing pages, based on associated keywords or keyword phrases that you have been informed about from a keyword analysis. In addition, on-page SEO is also about the technical part of a website. SEO is not only about texts and links, there is also a lot of technical work that needs to be done in order to be recognised by Google.
Working with off-page is where link building comes in. Link building is generally about getting other websites to link to yours, as according to Google this can be seen as recognition that you have content that is relevant to potential customers or readers. Read more about SEO.
What is SEA?
As written in the introduction in the last section, SEO is not about creating an ad. SEA is about paid advertising in the search engines. On Google, you can work on this part by using Google Ads.
By creating campaigns in Google Ads, you can target your Ads ads to your audience and promote your products or services to them.
The price of a Google Ads ad is different. The way you pay is through PPC, which is short for Pay Per Click, which means you pay for your ad every time a user clicks on it via Google.
SEM marketing can work wonders
Online marketing SEM can do wonders for most businesses, as the combination of SEO and SEA can create a solid marketing strategy.
By working with SEM all the way around, you can plan your SEM campaign based on using SEO at one point and SEA at another - depending on where it's needed most. They can overlap where it makes sense. For example, where you are strong SEO-wise, you may not need to work with SEA to the same extent and vice versa. The advantage of using SEA is that these ads are at the top, above the organic results. In return, you pay for them. And conversely, the benefit of search engine optimising your website is that your landing pages can rank high in the organic search results and you don't have to pay for your SEO efforts, it just takes time.
