If your company in Los Angeles is thinking about optimization in 2019, then they need to try and understand as much about SEO as possible, including its relationship to SEM.
Some people use these two terms as though they are interchangeable, but that is not the case. SEO, or search engine optimization, refers to any action that you take to modify your website or social media feeds so that they rank higher in the SERPs. SEM, or search engine marketing, refers specifically to advertising that uses a search engine as the vehicle through which the ads are conveyed. It is similar to using TV for commercials, where the television serves as the platform through which attention is drawn to a company or brand.
Although SEO is not precisely the same as SEM, they do have a relationship with one another. Let’s examine it a little further.
The Main Difference Between Them
What your Los Angeles company needs to understand is that SEO refers to unpaid efforts on your part, or the part of an agency that you hire for the purpose, to increase your visibility and draw more organic search traffic your way.
SEM is paid advertising. You pay for an ad for your company or one of your products to show up at the top of the Bing or Google results when someone uses a phrase or long-tail keyword. Money changing hands is the difference between SEO and SEM.
The Correlation
However, just because you are not directly spending money on SEO, optimization is time-consuming, and as you’ve no doubt heard, time is money. It’s also possible that you’re paying a Los Angeles SEO company for the work they’re doing for you, in which case you literally are paying for SEO.
In addition to all of that, sometimes SEO can serve the same purpose as SEM. If your endgame is to try and get people to come to your website and buy your products, that might be accomplished either through SEM or SEO. If it’s SEM that’s getting them to visit your site, then it’s because they clicked on an ad for which you paid.
If it’s SEO that attracted them, then it was your site appearing at the top of the rankings through your ingenuity, the way you used some keywords on your website or came up with some other method of grabbing that organic traffic.
When you’re trying to grow your brand, the best thing that you can do is to have SEO and SEM working together. Either one of them might result in a site visit, which in turn could lead to a sale. If you want the best chance of people buying from you, you should have both SEM and SEO working for you, Los Angeles. That will maximize your brand’s potential, and lead to substantial ROI.
