SEO, Stands For Search Engine Optimization
What that is is getting your website ranked inside of a search engine. Some of the most common search engines being google and bing. There, of course, are other search engines out there, LinkedIn has a search engine, facebook search engine, twitter search engine, youtube search engine, Instagram search engine and so on.
But most people commonly look at google and bing as the main search engines. Search engine optimization is just that side. Organically showing up inside of the search engines.
When I say organically that means not paying for an ad but just getting your website or some content on your website ranked so that you can get clicks to your website and then hopefully have them complete a goal.
SEM, Stand For Search Engine Marketing
Now, search engine marketing is a little bit different, search engine marketing is a term for SEM, that basically embodies search engine optimization as well as pay-per-click marketing.
Pay-per-click marketing is another form of search engine marketing that basically makes it so that you can serve ads inside of these search engines. Each of these search engines has the ability to deliver advertisements to people and that's a really really big business.
Most people in the business spend hundreds of dollars a month and it's an excellent way to drive traffic to your website.
What people love about it is you can see exactly how much every click costs, you can see how many clicks you can get for X amount of money, how many people come to a landing page, how many people convert from that landing page, and how many leads you get and you generally know how much that leads is worth to you base on how many of those leads you close, and you can develop a whole business out of it.
Also, if it's on the e-commerce side you can essentially do the same thing. When you drive people to a category page or a product page you will see how many people convert and then you can track all that back to the amount of money you spend and you can develop a great online business model.
So, search engine marketing just basically has search engine optimization and it has pay-per-click marketing as part for that bucket term.
A search engine marketing company or an agency will do both of those things and a search engine optimization company who only does search engine optimization does not do the paid part.
That's what those terms mean and I hope you get this clear