SEO vs. SEM: The Complete Guide

In this comprehensive SEO vs SEM guide, we’ll walk through everything you need to know to determine the optimal search strategy for your business. Understand the differences and benefits of SEO and SEM, and how you can use a combined approach to dominate the search engines.

Summary

• The search engine is a great place to find customers and drive traffic to your site
• SEO and SEM provide opportunities to show up in the search results
• The advantages of SEO are the sustained value, trustworthiness, and price tag that come with SEO
• The key advantages of SEM are the quick results, deep data, and test-able experiences
• Using a combined search strategy with both SEO and SEM can also be beneficial for many businesses if done well

Before we battle off SEO and SEM, let’s clarify what we mean when we say SEO and SEM.

The Search Engine

A search engine is a place you go to search for something to find relevant results or answers to your questions, where the most common search engines are Google and Bing.

Say you decided tomorrow that you wanted to find the best ice cream shop in your area, you’d probably pop open Google and write something along the lines of “best ice cream shops near me” and you’d get a handful of search results.

Within those search results, you’d likely see some organic, or unpaid, results and some paid results. The paid results are the ones that say “Ad” next to them and those are paid for by advertisers.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Now that we know what the search engine is, let’s understand what SEO is. SEO is the process of optimizing our site to rank well in the search results. If we run an online store that sells custom water bottles, we’d want to make sure that our site shows up in the organic results of Google (or Bing) when someone searches for custom water bottles.

SEO is a world of its own and there are tons of different components to getting SEO right, but we’ll leave that aside for this article.