Simple relationship and difference between SEM and SEO

Last updated on August 29, 2022

First, you need to understand what search marketing is. Search marketing is any strategy that helps brands gain attention by appearing on search engine results pages. It includes efforts to obtain higher rankings and increase search visibility, so as to bring more traffic to websites or specific pages.

The main difference between SEM and SEO is that the focus of search engine optimization (SEO) is to optimize the website in order to obtain traffic from natural search results. The goal of search engine marketing (SEM) is to obtain traffic and popularity from natural search and paid search.

In other words, Google's search results are divided into two main categories: paid search results and organic search results.

The goal of SEO is to show the ranking of your independent stations in the natural search results as high as possible. SEO is a free strategy:

You can also make your website appear in the payment area of search results through Pay Per Click (PPC). PPC is a payment strategy:

SEO means that you are 100% focused on ranking in natural search. SEM means that you use both SEO and PPC to get traffic from search engines.

Therefore, SEM is a broad term, including SEO and PPC. This means that SEO is a category under SEM.

However, in actual operation, we are used to saying PPC is SEM, so we will continue the conventional saying that SEO refers to free natural traffic, and SEM refers to paid advertising traffic.