These days you would be lucky to get through 24 hours without coming across an acronym. Whether you’re LOL-ing via SMS, working on your KPIs at an SMB, or DIY-ing in NSW, acronyms are unavoidable.

Digital marketing is no exception — in fact, many marketers could probably qualify for an excessive acronym user award.

On that, if you have a website, chances are you have come across these two acronyms commonly found in any self-respecting digital marketer's toolbelt: SEO and SEM. These are Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) — and they’re super important if you want anyone to find and subsequently visit your website.

What SEO and SEM have in common

Before we cover the differences between SEO and SEM, here’s what they have in common — they are both focused on helping your website to appear in your target audience’s search results on whatever search engine they use. (The search engine is most likely Google, given that it’s preferred by around 94% of Australians.)

Both SEO and SEM aim to improve your site’s visibility using keyword research and in turn drive high-quality traffic to your site.

And that’s pretty much where the similarities end.

SEO vs SEM: the differences

While SEO and SEM are both working with keywords and have the same goal in mind (visibility in search, resulting in traffic to your website), they’re not really the same at all — let us explain:

The work required

A digital marketer who does SEM might not do SEO and vice versa. Some may do both. The point is, the work undertaken for SEM vs SEO has little overlap outside of understanding your audience.

In SEM we design campaigns typically called Google Adwords campaigns that focus on getting your website in front of people who are searching for what you sell. This is a Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign — yes, another acronym. When working in PPC you place a bid on your desired keyword/s, then when someone searches for that keyword, your ad hopefully shows up and you pay the designated amount from your set campaign budget when someone clicks on your link.

When working on SEO for your website, the goal is to optimise the entire site to enable Google to better understand and trust its content. This means writing fresh content with quality internal and external links, resizing and naming images, changing URLs, writing relevant text for a bunch of little spots you might not realise exist such as meta tags, alt tags and header tags, adding links to other sources and much more.

Placement in search engine results

When using SEM, an Adwords campaign will mean that your website will pop up at the very top of the search page in the first handful of results. The paid search results are prominent and to the average Googler the small text denoting that it is an ad is barely noticeable.

On the other hand, SEO supports your site popping up in organic search results. Organic results sit further down the page and are not marked as ads or sponsored.

Timing of results

If you’re looking for fast results, SEM is your friend. With an effective SEM strategy in place, results are instant. You can turn your Adwords campaign on and off depending on your desired budget from month to month.

SEO is effective but you need to play the long game (we’re talking months). While a good SEO overhaul can work wonders for your website, it does tend to be an ongoing effort that is required to continue to maintain top results in organic search.

Ability to tweak and test

With SEM, your PPC campaign can quickly and easily be tested, tweaked and refined to establish what works for you and what doesn’t. Again, great for when you want more leads sooner rather than later.

SEO you can definitely tweak and refine, but you can’t test it and then quickly change it up to see a result in the short term. For this reason, it doesn’t have the same level of instant results like SEM.

To use SEM or SEO… Or both?

Knowing whether to use SEM or SEO can be tricky, let alone where to start.

One or both could be effective, but it depends on your business’s unique circumstances and goals.

We specialise in getting exceptional results using SEM to get your website more traffic from the right audience using carefully designed Adwords campaigns.

Let’s chat about how we can use SEM to grow your business.