What is Search Engine Marketing? – a very short lesson

Search Engine Marketing (or SEM) is one way of doing online marketing, along with other forms like display advertising, social media, affiliate marketing. This should be clear already.

The thing is though that there are at least two understandings of SEM out there. For instance, Google considers Search Engine Marketing as paid listings in search engine:

Search engine marketing is the process of promoting and marketing a website through paid listings (advertisements) on search engines.

In such an understanding, SEM is an alternative to Search Engine Optimization (optimizing your website pages so that they would rank higher in the search results for some search queries in certain search engines).

But there is another position, where Search Engine Marketing is an umbrella-term that names both SEO actions and paid listings in search engines. Such a position is held by Pierre Levasseur:

SEM is the umbrella term for the activities in advertising your site on search engines. There are two main activities in doing this. One is search engine optimization. [...] The second major activity of SEM is pay-per-click advertising, or simply PPC…

(from Levasseur’s Ebook on AdWords)

In the last understanding, the main common point of the two activities are the keywords that stand at the core of user’s activity on search engines (and even beyond then, if we are to be precise). More, even the listings on Google Maps would be a form of SEM.

Well, my own understanding of the issue favors Levasseur’s definition, which is more practical and a bit more precise in some aspects. Nonetheless, there still are some unsolved issues here:

• the term ‘marketing’ – there is a very bad habit of calling marketing some practices that is fact are just small parts of marketing. There is only a segment of the marketing mix. And I use here only (one of) Philip Kotler’s definition of marketing:

Marketing is the science and art of exploring, creating, and delivering value to satisfy the needs of a target market at a profit.

(For these matters to be even more complicated, check here a list of 72 marketing definitions!)

Obviously, when we talk about search engine marketing, we name some manners of online promotion and advertising.

• the localization of such ‘marketing’ on search engines – again, there is a simplification, because in the case of both practices named above, there are other places that take part: in AdWords, there are all the partner websites where you can advertise; for SEO, there is the main instance of the tactic which is your own website.

But of course, there are just some semantic complications imposed on a reality that has to be very practical and more that anything useful for you, the one that does the marketing. Therefore, the important thing is to understand what someone might say when talking about SEM, so that you can do things better for your brand online.