How  are SEO & SEM the same? SEO & SEM both promote your website though the internet via search engines . Both use keywords to help zoom in on quality traffic that could potential convert into a new client for your business, both can be tracked with Analytics for performance…. and I think that’s about all I can think of right now as far as similarities. ‘

What is SEO? The standard textbook definition for SEO is…

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results

The standard textbook definition for SEM is…

Search engine marketing, or SEM, is a form of Internet marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs) through the use of paid placement, contextual advertising, and paid inclusion.

These two sound pretty close right? If that’s the case someone who specializes in SEM should have no problem running a SEO campaign right? Wrong.

Creating an effective SEM campaign isn’t too terribly hard. You have a little research on your shoulders, plug a few keywords into the Google Adwords tool and check on your Google Analytic stats right? Maybe your smarter than the average Joe and you know a thing or two about Quality score so you vamp up the content on your landing pages to meet your search campaigns.

Creating an effective SEO campaign is by far different in the fact that you need to understand code, you need to understand how working elements of your website can affect your rankings, you need to know about internal ranking structure, external link structure, how to create a link, staying out of bad neighborhoods, what is a bad neighborhood and so on… the list goes on and on and on – if SEO was much like SEM everyone would be doing it – but they aren’t.

There you have it in a nutshell, the basic differences between SEO and SEM.

Until next time.