Transcript
Hi guys, and welcome to another edition of Zupo's SEO Talk and Tea.
Today's conversation is what the difference between SEM and SEO is. It's a very common misconception, so hope today's video will be just a short video clarifying what the difference between the two are. But this is SEO Talk and Tea, and I have again [inaudible 00:00:23] if you've seen the video, that was the duplicate content video, that was my first taste test. I like it so much, we're going to have it again.
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So today's conversation, again, is going to be about what the difference between SEM and SEO is. But before I get started, let me start brewing this, but discussing SEM and SEO, they're commonly used as synonyms by the small business and general business kind of market, but they're actually not the same, so I kind of want to clarify with the differences.
SEM stands for search engine marketing. SEO stands for search engine optimization. The best way to understand it, SEM is search engine marketing. It entails anything to do with search engines and marketing in those search engines. Search engine optimization is specifically about the organic side. So the best way to think about it is SEM, search engine marketing, is the umbrella and it branches off to two things. One is called SEO, which is search engine optimization, and the second is Google Ads or pay-per-click. So, SEM is actually more of an umbrella term. SEO is more of a specific part of SEM, right? So again, the difference is SEM does include SEO. SEO and Google ads make up search engine marketing. But SEO is not the parallel equivalent to SEM. So again, this is the best way to think about structuring it, it's SEM and SEO and Google AdWords. And to be honest, that's pretty much it.
So when someone's talking about SEM in conversation with you, they mean Google organic and paid. If they're talking about SEO, they're just talking about organic side. So when you're having these conversations, if you're wanting to engage in paid advertising on Google Ads, then you can use [inaudible 00:02:13] SEO. Ooh, I spilled. Oh no. But if you're trying to go for organic and paid, then you can say SEM. If you don't want to be using Google Ads or paying for ads, you would be doing SEO, or if you want to go the paid route and you don't really care about the SEO side, it's PPC or Google Ads.
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So again, SEM, which is both SEO, organic, non-paid, Google Ads, paid, PPC, pay-per-click. So that was a quick video. Hopefully that explains the definition between SEM and SEO and we just added PPC for better understanding. I'm going to go ahead and enjoy this tea again, I think this is going to quickly become one of my more favorite teas. If you guys liked what you saw today, please like and subscribe and we hope to see you guys again soon. Thanks.