The acronym SEA is often mistakenly confused with SEM. However, it is important to clarify between the two terms and to specify their function in the world of web marketing. Remember that web marketing can be defined as a set of tools, strategies and techniques that are used to promote brands, products and services through one or more digital channels, with the aim of increasing a company’s business.
When we talk about SEO, SEA and SEM there is often confusion. Today, we want to clarify the differences once and for all, specifying what SEA is and why it is important in web marketing, but especially why it is confused with the term SEM.
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What is SEA?
The acronym SEA stands for Search Engine Advertising which we can translate as ‘search engine advertising’. It deals with the creation of paid advertisements on search engines. Together with SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), which instead deals with optimising and positioning a website and all its online content organically, SEA enables the placement of paid content. This mechanism is based on the famous PPC (Pay per Click) concept, whereby the advertiser only pays when the ad is clicked.
When a user performs a search, Google works to place ads in that search. If we talk about search campaigns, paid advertisements will appear above and below the organic results. Imagine this process as an auction in which the best bid wins, which then becomes the best score for a whole series of factors that influence this result. Whoever sets up the ad must take into account several parameters such as keywords, target audience, geographic area of reference and so on.
To create an advertising campaign, one uses Google Ads, the Google tool with which advertisers set specific conditions in economic, practical and structural terms for their advertisements.
What advantages does SEA bring?
The main feature that makes SEA almost indispensable is its speed. In fact, after the start of a campaign, it will only take a few minutes in most cases to get the first results, in terms of clicks of course.
This is why we at SEMprofile also use SEA to test different keywords with a view to optimising our SEO strategy. It is important for us not to focus initially on SEO alone, as the latter almost always generates results in the long term. SEA, on the other hand, can start to give us data to work with (data-driven approach) with a view to optimising the SEO strategy.
Why is the acronym SEA confused with SEM?
To sum up, therefore, SEA and SEO are that set of paid and unpaid actions that web marketing makes use of, and that make up the specific marketing for search engines, SEM. It is therefore correct to use this term to refer to search engine-related activities as a whole. The main reason why the two acronyms are confused lies in the fact that little attention is paid to the vocabulary, substituting them incorrectly in our opinion.
In fact, it is important to point out that SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing, a branch of web marketing that indicates the set of marketing processes that have the role of acquiring users within a website through SEA and SEO.