Name: SEO vs. SEM: Whats the Difference and Why You Should Care
Uploaded: 2019-12-05T03:20:46.000Z
Duration: 9 min 7 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

The difference between SEO and SEM is simple.

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the practice of optimizing content to be discovered through

And SEM or Search Engine Marketing, is  traditionally SEO plus Pay-per-click advertising,

but some people just look at it as PPC today.

Now, you might be thinking that SEO is the way to go

since organic traffic is free, consistent, and passive.

But it'd be short-sighted to think that it's the only way to grow your business through search.

So today, we're going to be talking about some  search engine marketing strategies and when

and where you should be using SEO, PPC, or both.

Sam Oh here with Ahrefs, the SEO tool that helps you grow your search traffic, research

your competitors and dominate your niche.

Search engines are in my opinion, the best  traffic source.

In fact, around 5 billion searches happen on Google every single day.

It's also been reported that search engines drive 10 times more traffic to shopping sites

And for you local business owners, 72%  of consumers who did a local search

Now, to explain why SEO and PPC are both important, let's play a game of "would you rather."

Would you rather be able to instantly rank #1 for any keyword

or have an unlimited PPC budget to pay for ads?

Now, I certainly don't have an answer to this, but let's unpack both sides.

From a pure SEO perspective, you need to remember that search engines are businesses.

They need to make money in order to operate.

As a result, most, if not all platforms will give  premium placements to paying customers.

For example, commercial keywords like "insurance," have a ton of value and therefore, a ton of competition,

so the entire fold is pretty much covered in ads, making organic results near invisible.

So assuming you ranked organically for this keyword,

a searcher would have to scroll down for a while

before even entertaining the thought of  going to your page.

Sure, if you had an infinite budget, you'd be ranking #1 at the top of every page, right?

Google doesn't show Ads on every page  for every search.

There needs to be some sort of commercial intent in order for Ads to appear.

For example, key in something with clear  commercial intent, like "buy red sox tickets,"

Type in an informational query, like "what to do in Boston," and you won't see any Ads.

So if you were to opt-in for an infinite Ads budget, but no SEO, you'd be missing out

And another thing to note is that commercial keywords generally have less search volume

than informational ones, which would even further limit your pool of relevant traffic.

As you can see here in Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer, the informational query gets searched nearly

So now I'm guessing that your answer to unlimited SEO traffic vs PPC traffic is probably tougher

But this is why we have yet another acronym, SEM, where we can combine the two strategies

and truly take our search engine marketing to another level.

Let's go through a few strategies that should give you a good idea of when and why to implement

First, try running Ads for keywords that are too competitive to rank for... at least for now.

There are likely keywords in your industry that you won't be able to rank for in years.

For example, if you were creating a brand new supplements store and you wanted to rank

for things like "buy protein powder," then  your chances of a Top 3 ranking are slim.

You'd be competing against the likes of  Amazon, GNC, and Walmart to name a few.

Now, it doesn't mean that you should abandon SEO altogether and just run ads.

But since ranking for competitive terms will likely be a long play,

PPC can help get the ball rolling immediately.

And there are three massive benefits to using PPC while you're working to rank your pages.

First, you can immediately start generating revenue since you're paying for traffic.

This will hopefully help get some cash flow coming  in, but do note that just because you advertise,

it doesn't mean you'll have a positive return.

Oftentimes, it can take months and a lot of lost dollars to find a campaign that works for you.

Second, you get an opportunity to test and optimize for conversions.

Most ad platforms have conversion-tracking features.

Afterall, if publishers can see that their ad spend  is returning positive ROI, they'll keep spending.

So use this as an opportunity to get insights on things like the average cost per conversion.

Run controlled tests to improve your conversion rate.

And as you start producing profit from your ads, scale out to other platforms.

And third, you can get valuable keyword data.

Within Google Ads, they have a report called,  "Search Terms."

Within this report, you can see keywords that people  are bidding on and see conversion numbers with them.

This can help you get an understanding of whether the keywords you want to target

As a hypothetical example, let's say that you  were bidding on "protein powder," and getting

a ton of traffic because it's a popular query.

But in terms of net profit, you weren't profitable.

Within the Search Terms report, you might find  that a keyword like "grass fed whey protein"

sends a lot less traffic but converts at a much higher rate.

So what I recommend you do is to export the search terms report from Google Ads.

Then use a keyword research tool like Ahrefs'  Keywords Explorer, where you can paste up to

10,000 keywords at once and get all their metrics.

Now, I don't have an Ads campaign on protein  powder, but to illustrate my point,

you'll see that the Keyword Difficulty score is  much lower for "grass fed whey protein."

So it would be worth investigating and potentially creating a new page for.

That way you'll likely be able to get some traffic from organic search faster.

We have a full tutorial on keyword research where I outline a detailed step-by-step process

to assess ranking difficulty, so I highly recommend checking that out.

Now, another reason you might use both SEO and PPC is if the search results pages are covered in Ads.

As you already saw in the "insurance" example, competitive keywords generally have a lot of people

willing to pay top dollar to appear at the top.

And even if you're ranking #1 through SEO,  the organic results are so far down

Subtitles ListPlay Video

SEO vs. SEM: Whats the Difference and Why You Should Care

perspective

tough

opportunity

strategy