What is SEO and SEM? What is the difference between them?

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) means to improve the ranking of your website in various keywords by favouring the different algorithms of search engines. Throughout this process you can improve the organic traffic and ranking of your website on search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Baidu, Yandex, Naver etc. 

There are three key points to master SEO:

1. Site structure 

Site structure is how you organise your website’s content. When your content is grouped, linked and presented properly, your website will be user-friendly so that visitors are likely to visit your website and search engines can index your URLs better. 

2. Site content 

The content needs to favour the search engines and your audience at the same time. It is better to write content from the perspective of the target audiences to ensure that someone wants to read it. With great content, your website can have more visitors and the ranking can be improved. 

3. External Links

External links are hyperlinks that will direct a user from one page to another target page when clicked. When the external links and your website are highly related and authorized, the search engine will identify your website as trustworthy and the ranking can be improved.

What is SEM?

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is the process of increasing website impressions on search engine results pages through paid search advertising. The most common SEM is setting keyword search advertisements on Google ads. It is a quick and useful approach for promoting your new products and events, or increasing your brand awareness in a short period of time. 

There are two key points to create an attractive and effective advertisement campaign:

1. Keywords

Setting relevant keywords is important, as it is where your advertisement will be shown. Setting general keywords like “shoes” can help you gain more impressions while setting specific keywords like “high heel shoes” can help you reach your target audiences. You need to set keywords according to your goal.

2. Contents

The quality of your advertisement will affect the ranking and also the cost. A quality score is determined by expected clickthrough rate, advertisement relevance and expected clickthrough rate. If you have a higher quality score, you can rank higher and increase the chance to appear on the front page. You will also have a lower PPC (Pay Per Click). Further information: How to Check and Improve your Quality Score

SEOSEMFree: For SEO, what you need to do is to optimise your own website. If you create a high-quality website, it will rank high in search engines naturally. It is totally free of chargePaid: For SEM, it means that you are going to set advertisement campaigns to get a high ranking in search engines. It is charged depending on the duration and exposure.Takes time: SEO helps your website to rank in high position on search engines by website optimization. However, SEO requires more time and patience since search engines value authority and that takes time to establish. SEO is better for branding as it can bring you stable conversion in the long run. |More instant results: For SEM, your website ranks high right after paying and so you can see a significant increase in the traffic of your website immediately. SEM is more suitable for event promotion as it can give you high impressions instantly but temporarily. If you want to keep such high exposure, it may cost a lot.

We can help your company to increase both organic and paid traffic. Our team is able to cover all aspects of SEO and SEM from content creation to web development. Aiming to improve your search engine ranking sustainably to drive organic traffic, ranging from meta-tags to backlinks building, tailoring a SEM advertising campaign. Having SEO/SEM service can definitely help your company to increase exposure, contact DigitSense to know how to start!