SEO deals with increasing your online rankings when it comes to organic searches that are SEO optimizing does not require you to spend money on increasing your rankings. The website should be optimized in a way that it’s easier for search engines to discover them. Changes to the content structure are made so that for every search query related to the content in your website, your site will have maximum relevance.

SEM or Search Engine Marketing can be defined similar to SEO, because of these methods are used to increase the search rankings of a website. The key difference between SEM and SEO is that SEM increases search rankings by paid advertisements. The ads you see on a search engines’ result page is hosted there by the companies who use SEM. You might have seen that these ads seem more relevant to your search queries, this is because search engines also rank these ads by relevance.

In simpler terms we can differentiate between the two in a line, as

*SEO: Earning traffic for the website through unpaid or free listings

*SEM: Buying traffic for the website through paid search listings

The most popular platform among search engines is Google AdWords (Google’s SEM platform). While the list contains names as Bing, Yahoo, etc. Usually, these platforms list some websites in of their search results as paid Ads. SEM companies mainly target all kinds of search results, including image, video, academic, news, industry-specific, etc.