SEO vs. SEM
September 4, 2024 ⚊ 1 Min read ⚊ Views 14 ⚊ BLOG
SEM stands for search engine marketing – or, as it is more commonly known, search marketing.
Search marketing is a type of digital marketing. It is an umbrella term for the combination of SEO and PPC activities meant to drive traffic via organic search and paid search.
Put simply, search marketing is the process of gaining traffic and visibility from search engines through both paid and unpaid efforts.
So how do SEO and SEM differ? Technically they aren’t different – SEO is simply one-half of SEM:
SEO = driving organic traffic from search engines.
SEM = driving organic and paid traffic from search engines.
Now, this is where things get a bit confusing.
Today, many people use SEM interchangeably with PPC (which we’ll talk about in the next section).
This idea seems to undercut SEO. However, SEO is marketing, just like PPC is marketing.
