SEM jobs and SEO jobs – spot the difference

Now, after some practical experience I'm pleased say I have experienced the difference first hand.

For me, in simple terms, the task of people in SEO jobs is simply to gain top search engine rankings. What I hadn't appreciated until recently is that this alone does not guarantee commercial results. SEM jobs, on the other hand, are charged with activities which will generate commercial results.

To give my own example, we operate jobs boards in a variety of sectors (SEO jobs included of course) and I had incorrectly assumed that gaining top google positions would generate the results we needed to stop our huge outlay on pay per click advertising. We set about an aggressive SEO campaign on a small handful of phrases and finally achieved front page positions on google, upon which we stopped a large proportion of our pay per click advertising through both google and overture. Unfortunately, our traffic and commercial outcomes declined almost immediately.

Looking back, the issue was one of coverage. It's all very well in SEO jobs being number one for your most important phrase. However, what had unwittingly generated the commercial success we had achieved was the relatively broad spread of exposure which had resulted from a fairly indiscriminate pay per click campaign. In the scenario above, we regained our composure through adding back in some targeted PPC activity to generate the additional traffic necessary to achieve results.

Now, when launching a new site, although we aim for the top with certain phrases, we are more aware that we need a spread of traffic building activities in order to succeed. In most cases in SEM jobs, good commercial results will require a mix if SEO work to achieve organic results alongside other activities such as PCC to get the overall level of traffic to the necessary level. In addition, people in SEM jobs must be in tune with clients markets to establish which key phrases will generate commercial outcomes, versus those which simply generate a profile in the market place.

To date, SEO tends to be the favoured terminology for the lay person looking for services in this sector. However, as understanding increases, my prediction is that this will shift towards SEM jobs, with SEO becoming a subset of this.