What Is Search Engine Marketing Exactly?

By: Jonathan Stec

Published: September 7th, 2024

Search Engine Marketing is a term I hear used to describe various functions. However, the definition of Search Engine Marketing is marketing done to increase your presence in search engine results. There are currently two ways to do this: 1. With PPC aka Pay Per Click advertising (ie Google Ads, Microsoft Ads), and 2. With SEO aka Search Engine Optimization which is optimizing your website to improve its favorability in the eyes of the search engine you want to improve rankings on.

So, think of SEM (Search Engine Marketing) as an umbrella term containing PPC and SEO.