SEO and SEM: What Are They?

Gaining visibility is a common concern for every business, especially in a globalized environment where competition is everywhere. This occurs not only in the physical world but also online. This is where SEO and SEM come into play to help brands gain greater exposure with their website and attract more traffic, which translates into sales opportunities. Learn what each of these strategies entails!

What Do They Mean?

They are digital marketing strategies aimed at getting your company’s website to appear at the top of the search engine results pages (Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.), making it easier for people to find and discover your products or services.

SEO

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and focuses on getting the search engine to recognize that your page is relevant, user-friendly, and easy to crawl, so
it appears among the top organic results (without paying). It can be divided into two categories based on its practices:

On-Page SEO: Refers to the changes you make on your website to improve its ranking. Common actions include

• Speeding up your website and altering its design to ensure an exceptional user experience
• Creating valuable content that helps address the needs of your target audience (blog articles, videos, infographics, guides, etc.)
• Including keywords on your website, representing potential user searches.

Off-Page SEO: Focuses on improving the site’s authority through backlinks, which are links to your website created by other high-importance sites. Common practices include:

• Publishing guest posts by writing content on other brands’ sites and creating a link to your page.
• Making comments on high-authority forums and blogs that include the hyperlink

SEM

On the other hand, Search Engine Marketing refers to paid advertising in search engines. You can easily differentiate it from SEO by doing a search on Google; those pages with a box that says «ad» are part of an SEM campaign.

SEO and SEM: Pros and Cons

SEM has a short duration since once your campaign budget is exhausted, the search engine will stop showing your ads in the top results. On the other hand, SEO is reflected in the medium and long term, often having a longer duration but more gradual results.

Separate or Combined?

The use of SEO and SEM depends on the company’s objectives and resources. However, a good digital marketing strategy includes both and distinguishes their application: SEM is used to present your site to the user when they perform transactional searches, meaning when they want to purchase a specific product or service; and SEO is employed when the person is researching to gain knowledge and information that solves their issues.

Therefore, you need to analyze the opportunities for your brand and develop what can help you take advantage of each one.

Now you know what SEO and SEM are. Remember that these strategies will allow you to achieve online visibility and increase your brand’s impact. So, it’s time to benefit from these methodologies to boost sales and strengthen your company’s online presence.