So What's the Difference Already?

SEM and SEO are terms that are often confused and used interchangeably, so what’s the difference? What will benefit your website, organization or company more? How do you know which one to use and how much money to spend?

Simply put, SEO (search engine optimization) is a component of SEM (search engine marketing). SEO is a way to optimize your website for search engines, such as Google. SEM is the process of marketing and promoting your website through search engines that visitors typically utilize to search out new products and services. SEM is important to consider if new visitors coming across your website is an essential part of your companies’ overall marketing strategy. SEO is often offered as a standalone service by “SEO experts”, however, SEO should be a part of every website and we believe any good web company will include this in their web development projects.

To effectively optimize your website for searches you need to consider these 3 important pieces of SEO:

1. Incoming links - are links that lead users to your website from other websites or online sources. Incoming links are the most important piece of SEO. Simply put, when you have other websites linking to your website and additionally “telling” a search engine what your website is about – you’ve hit the jackpot. It’s important to note that incoming links can be very hard to get. They require you to generate valuable content worth linking to or the creation of partnerships with other websites.
2. Page structure and hierarchy - all good web companies will tell you that the use of correct HTML tags such as the <title> tag and <h1>, <h2>, <h3> tags structured throughout your website, are important in letting search engines know which words and phrases are most important on your web pages.
3. Key phrases - although it’s most commonly thought that keywords are important in SEO, key phrases are actually what gets the job done and your website up in the rankings. Ideally you should have one key phrase per page on your website. Key phrases are combinations of words that a visitor may use to find your site i.e. “web design in London Ontario”.

A common SEM technique is Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising. PPC ads help to give your website instant placement in search rankings and are often used in conjunction with SEO. An example of a great PPC service is Google AdWords. Using AdWords will allow any company to display custom advertisements next to search results for relevant key phrases all dependant on a monthly budget and fee.

So now that you understand the difference between SEM and SEO you can determine what is important for your company, website and overall marketing strategy, and effectively allocate your online budget.