Often times, I come across people who keep asking about SEO and SEM. In most instances, the differentiation between these two terms as well as the relationship between these two terms is not understood very well. This post is towards demystifying what it means and what it can do in a B2B setting.

SEM encompasses SEO and Paid Advertising and in a B2B setting, SEM is all about SEO and nothing else. Some trends that support this statement are:

• Six out of seven clicks on the search engine result page are generated by organically-listed sites
• 79% of participants don’t look at sponsored links at all
• Prime real estate on the search engine result pages don’t attract clicks

Hence, it is futile to spend your time in doing paid advertising (it is also known as PPC and CPC), where the probability of visitors coming to your web property is only 1/7.  Hence a very well thought out SEO should be the idea and that will ensure optimized site both for your users and the search engines. This is precisely what is going to drive traffic to your site.

Since SEO is a long-drawn process, paid advertising in the initial days certainly brings visibility to your site and the results are immediate. This, in my mind, is only fair - but at the same time focus should be in doing SEO and not just look at tactical advertising activities alone. Essentially, SEM (which is a combination of SEO and paid advertising) is an ongoing process and it cannot be done as a one time $99 activity.