Newcomers to the digital marketing sector have one main gripe. At first, it’s very difficult to suss out the difference from SEO to SEM, from SM to PPC (at least, in the latter, there is not one ‘s’ to be found).
So, before you begin to look at digital marketing, check out the main acronyms first – it can save you a big headache later. Of course, what more experienced practitioners also know – or quickly realise, that when it comes to digital marketing, these acronyms tend to change in definition anyway. And if they don’t change, they can be open to interpretation. So when you hear, or read the letters SEO, ensure you have a basic meaning of what they mean.
SEO is perhaps the easiest to grasp because it is one of the most common disciplines of digital marketing and perhaps the most understood.
Search Engine Optimisation is all about ensuring that a website is fully optimised in the eyes of the search engines. It basically means that a website is set up properly and will attract the attention of the search engines who are increasingly rewarding sites for structure, navigation, relevance, content and links.
Search Engine Marketing generally refers to those disciplines which are used to actively promote a website (as opposed to the organic SEO), via such strategies as Pay Per Click. This is proactive and is not passive (or organic), as SEO.
But the moral of the tale is: know your SEO from your SEM. As for Social Media, then that’s a whole new ball game!