SEO and SEM – What’s that you say?

SEO (search engine optimization) and SEM (search engine marketing) in broad terms encompass the full range of methods employed to gain traffic to your website via the primary conduit of the all powerful search engines.

Building a website without a primary focus on how you’re going to gain traffic, particularly through the engines is short sighted and money not well spent.

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SEO is the art and science of getting found in the primary “natural search” location(s) within the various search engines. As you likely know when search results are presented on a given page that space is shared between “natural” search results and “paid” placements. Sometimes this distinction is more evident on some results pages then others.

The “natural” results typically populate the bulk of the listings and primary locations… but not always. The intent is to present an unbiased, value-based priority of links.  Typically web crawlers and algorithms or other methodologies present a set of website listings based upon their intrinsic value and/or popularity relative to what terms are being used in peoples search queries.

The oft-cited eye-tracking study shown above confirms that when people search they pay considerably more attention to the “natural”, unbiased search results listings then they do “paid” listings. The example above is from Google but it holds true for the other search engines as well.

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SEM most commonly refers to the high-profile “paid” placements in the primary search engines.  It’s important to know though, there is a much broader world of other paid placements available to web marketers. These can be further segmented by local engines, niche subject/industry engines, and too many others to enumerate here.

SEO and SEM is not an either/or consideration. Most online enterprises engage in some mix of both as each has it’s applications, strengths, limitations and budgetary considerations.

SEO has the benefit of significantly higher traffic volumes if… you’re able to gain good SERP (search engine results page) positioning on your targeted terms. The limitation is lack of immediacy and lesser certainty on optimization actions taken on results attained.  It’s more difficult to predict and connect the cause/effect dots in SEO. The rewards however can be significant, particularly in terms of ROI.

SEM is hugely popular primarily because of its greater measure of predictibility, and immediacy on actions taken. Because you can better measure performance it’s easier to budget and manage. The trade-off is that, in part because of it’s popularity, it has priced itself out of range of needed ROI for many marketers. Additionally while effective, as shown in the above images, paid links typically attain much lower visibility, traffic volumes and the dynamics on conversion rates for a paid link is, well different.

So a good mix of both SEO and SEM is what works for most online enterprises. Let us help you with determining the how, why and where of employing these methods to gain traffic to your website.
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