Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is the comprehensive practice of increasing traffic to a website from search engine results. While it can also include organic SEO, the primary focus of SEM is on paid advertising.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) has developed into a major industry. Unlike SEO, which focuses on improving organic (unpaid) rankings, SEM strategically utilizes the power of paid advertisements that appear prominently in search engine results.
SEM strategies are designed to attract visitors directly from search engines and place them into a marketing funnel, where they are intended to eventually complete a desired action (e.g., purchasing a product). This approach can require significantly less time than SEO, but the cost of paid ads can fluctuate dramatically based on auction-style bids and the popularity of the targeted keywords.