SEO vs. SEM: What Is The Difference?

This is the Dragon Digital Marketing Podcast. Get ready for the digital marketing strategies and tactics that attract great customer relationships to your business. Here is your host, Monique Idemudia. Hi there. This is Monique and you're listening to episode number 10 of the Dragon Digital Marketing Podcast. Today I got a quick tip for you. I want to take a few minutes and explain the difference between Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing and how that is related to Pay Per Click advertising and Social Media Marketing. This is something that seems to be confusing for a lot of people. You're definitely not alone if you're confused by it as well. Search Engine Marketing or SEM, describes all marketing efforts that involve search engines like Google. Search Engine Optimization or SEO is a component of Search Engine Marketing, and it is the process of increasing the quality and quantity of website traffic to your website by increasing the visibility of pages on your website, to searchers on a search engine. SEO consists of a number of digital marketing practices, strategies, and tactics that make you rank higher for relevant keywords in Google. SEO is free and it's organic. You just have to put in effort and you can see results. You cannot pay Google to rank you higher and the search results. Google makes money solely through selling ads. This means SEO is a component of SEM. Now, another way to promote yourself on search engines like Google is through ads. You can pay for Google ads and you pay per click. This is how Pay Per Click advertising is related to Search Engine Marketing. Pay Per Click or PPC, is an internet advertising model used to drive traffic to your website, in which you pay when your ad is clicked. When your ad is shown to a person and gets an impression, but they do not click on it, you don't have to pay. It's the most popular advertising model for online advertising. There are a couple of other models like Pay Per Conversion, but Pay Per Click is the most commonly used. Your Social Media Marketing efforts also can be either organic and free, or paid when you buy ads on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and so on. You can also pay for those ads per click. And then you have your regular posts that are not promoted and sponsored, and they're free and reach people organically. So SEO is when your organic and free marketing efforts overlap with your Search Engine Marketing efforts. And when you advertise on social media, your Social Media Marketing strategy would overlap with another type of the digital marketing, PPC advertising. And your Search Engine Marketing strategy can overlap with PPC advertising as well, when you run ads in search engines to get featured and top of the search results. And, of course, your organic and free marketing efforts can also overlap with your Social Media Marketing strategy, when you publish regular posts on your profile that you do not boost or promote. You can imagine this in a Venn diagram. And in fact, I have created a Venn diagram for you to better illustrate this concept for you. You can go and check it out in the show notes of this episode on dragon-digital-marketing.com and this is episode number 10. And that is what I got for you today. Short and sweet. I hope this helped you out a lot, and if so, please share this episode and also make sure to subscribe and check out the other episodes, too. If you feel like you could use some help with your digital marketing, check out our agency, Dragon Digital Marketing. We're happy to help you out. Until next time. Thank you for joining us for this episode of the Dragon Digital Marketing Podcast. You can visit us at dragon-digital-marketing.com for more resources and for more episodes. Let us know how you like the show and write us a review. We are grateful when you like, share, and subscribe. We appreciate you.