Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is the paid form of search engine results. It uses paid advertisements to bring up results on the search engine results page. In this form of marketing, advertisers bid on keywords that searchers can put in the search boxes. For example, a searcher may be looking for “Men’s shoes online”. In this case, results for advertisers bidding on this search term will show up on the results page.

Search Engine Marketing is also known as Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising. There are various forms of PPC Ads such as Text Ads, Call Only Ads, Responsive Ads, and Image Ads, etc.

Now let us focus on the major difference between SEM and Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

1. SEO is getting search results organically, that is through the unpaid form. However, SEM is using the paid system for showing up results.

2. SEM Ads contain the word ‘Ad’ written before them, and appear on the first and last part of the page.SEO Results appear in between the SEM results on the page.

3. SEO is the process of optimizing your website to achieve higher traffic and ranking, while SEM is aimed at getting higher traffic to websites by paying to search engine like Google for showing ads.

SEM has been dominated by Google through their Google Adwords program, now renamed as Google Ads.

Kolkata School of Digital Marketing provides a 2 weeks dedicated course to hone your Pay Per Click marketing course.