Friday, 29 May 2020

What is the difference between SEO and SEM?

We do not want to leave out of this article a topic that causes a lot of confusion among professionals who are just beginning in the world of Digital Marketing and this is the difference between SEO and SEM.

Although at first they may seem to refer to similar actions given the similarity of their acronyms, you should pay close attention because they refer to completely different actions. Let's see one by one.

SEO = organic positioning

As you may already know, SEO refers to all those actions that you can take inside or outside of your website to optimize its positioning in search engines organically. This last point is key since organic means "no payment" .

With an SEO strategy you do not pay Google or any other search engine to gain positions in the SERP. It is your valuable content and your optimizations that earn these places in their own right.

SEM = Positioning payment

In contrast, SEM — Search Engine Marketing — refers to those strategies that include the use of paid ads.

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That is, with an SEM strategy you create an advertising campaign so that when a user types a search, your site appears before the organic results in the form of an ad, as long as it agrees with the user's search intention.

Which to choose?

A complete Digital Marketing strategy should not opt for one and exclude the other. That is, you must include in your strategy a combination of SEO and SEM strategies to increase their results.

With the use of SEM, results are generated instantly in a short term, necessary when you want to increase visibility or brand recognition quickly or when you want to launch products or promotions for a limited time.

In addition, SEO is a strategy that works in the medium and long term, constantly bringing better quality visits.

If you want to expand this matter further we recommend you read our article on SEO vs. SEM .

Brief history of SEO and how Google's algorithm has evolved

Since people realized that the best way to deliver their content to Internet users was through search engines , they devised a series of techniques to conquer their first places. These techniques were called SEO.

However, in the 90s, content was more concerned with positioning than user experience. That is why Google began to update its algorithm constantly to deliver the most relevant results in each search.

Below, we'll take a look at the main algorithm updates.

Google Panda

In 2011 came the first major update to the algorithm. Google Panda began to analyze and evaluate websites based on the quality of their content, reviewing aspects such as grammar and duplicate content and, in turn, rewarding original and valuable content.

Google Penguin

A year later, in April 2012, Google Penguin was launched to monitor the health of website link building .

Basically, Google Penguin checks that the external links that are sent to the pages are natural and of quality. Therefore, it stimulates relevant backlinks and adds value to the user who reaches another website from them.

Google Hummingbird

In 2013, Google Hummingbird began to classify content according to semantic and user interest factors. It is with Hummingbird that Google understands natural language, expanding its way of interpreting content to variations of keywords or related keywords.

Google Pigeon

In 2014, with Google Pigeon the search engine began to organize search results according to the geographical location of users. It is from here that local SEO begins to gain prominence.

Google Mobilegeddon

In 2015 the mobile device boom arrives and Google adapts to it with Google Mobilegeddon. With this update, Google rewards sites that are mobile-friendly: those that have a responsive design and that optimize their loading speeds.

Google RankBrain

One of the most radical algorithm changes occurred with Google RankBrain, in 2015. With this update, Google delivers the most relevant content to the user according to their search intention.
In this free infographic that we prepared you can find more detailed information about this story and how Google currently works. 

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