Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing are two important but confusing/overlapping components for most business owners. In fact, many businesses found themselves totally helpless in understanding if there are any differences between two services, which makes them use these terms interchangeably.
Well, if you into an e-commerce business, it is important for you to know the differences between these important components of the e-commerce industry. In this post, we will be trying to help you out to differentiate between these terms, so you had a better idea which service will work best for your business.
Let’s start with Search Engine Optimization.
What is search engine optimization (SEO)?
Frankly, I think most businesses if not all, are well aware of the services and significance of search engine optimization or simply SEO. The term refers to a complete suite of services that are aimed to help businesses rank high on search engines (most probably Google). This means that SEO services are meant to give businesses higher visibility, better projection, and larger traffic to their websites.
For the most part, SEO services are limited to driving more organic traffic to your site (well, of course, there is then conversion optimization as well, but that’s another thing to talk about). Primarily it can be termed as the process that aims to maximize the number of users that lands on a website by ranking them higher in search engines.
What are the services included in SEO?
As stated above, SEO is a complete suite of different services that are made to work in alliance to extract best results. Let’s just broadly categorize SEO services into two categories:
On-Page SEO:
This includes:
– Keyword selection, and its integration into meta tags, meta description, alt texts etc.
– Web content creation
– Cleaning URLs
– Optimizing page load speed
– Google Indexing
– Social sharing
– Much more
Off Page SEO:
This includes:
– High quality keywords rich and relevant content creation
– High quality link building
– Social Sharing
– Much more
What’s Search Engine Marketing?
To simply put, search engine marketing is a form of digital marketing services that are aimed to promote online businesses over search engines primarily by paid advertising. Search engine marketing (SEM) is a faster way of achieving higher rankings in SERPs.
What are the services included in SEM suite?
Interestingly, SEO is also a part of SEM, however not very significant. As we said above, SEM is a form of digital marketing services primarily driven by paid advertising; thereby these include PPC campaigns and other related activities.
What’s the difference between SEO and SEM?
To start-off, SEO is more organic in nature. For instance, if you hire SEO services for your X business in Las Vegas, it might take 3 to 6 months for the business to rank over the Google’s first page. Alternatively, if you decide to go with digital marketing Las Vegas services (in this case SEM), you can achieve higher ranking instantly. That’s because you will be paying Google to put your business AD at the top of its page.
So, if you want instant recognition and customers, digital marketing Las Vegas might be your best bet. However, going with SEM alone won’t bear any fruit for your business in the longer run. This is because SEO is an organic process that will help your business reach the top and stay there for a long time, whereas, ranking from SEM need constant PPC campaigns which might prove too costly in the longer run.
