Here at Client ConneXion, we offer a great deal of features to help your dealership better connect with past, current, and potential customers. With each of our features comes years and years of experience and research to back it up, making each feature that we offer highly successful for your company. Today, we want to chat about SEO/SEM ConneXion – more specifically, the difference between search engine optimization and search engine marketing.

Didn’t know these two terms referred to different things? Many do not. Often, people (even marketing professionals) will use these two words interchangeably, making it even more confusing for dealerships to assess. We would like to clear these terms up for the sake of your dealership.

Let’s start with SEO. Search engine optimization is a component of SEM, and is the process of getting the highest number of visitors to your website by making sure the site appears high on search engine results. SEO is gaged by guidelines set by Google with both on-page and off-page activities. These include:

  • On-page: Keywords, heading tags, alt text, blog posts optimized with quality, clean and formatted page URLs, optimized page load speed, authorship by Google, integrating social media.
  • Off-page: Creating high-quality backlinks to your site, social sharing signals, social bookmarking.

There are many ways you can optimize your website when a potential client types your dealership into a search engine. While being first on the list is not always guaranteed, you can take steps to get in the top five listings on a search engine.

Now, on to SEM. Search engine marketing is a form of digital marketing that promotes websites by increasing their “rank” in search engine listings through optimization and advertising. In other words, SEM is an umbrella over various marketing tactics, including SEO.

Folks often get confused when it comes to these two marketing terms, but understanding that SEO is a subset of SEM can help ease the confusion. It is important to understand that these two words should not be used interchangeably, as they do not mean the same thing.

Want to learn more about our SEO/SEM ConneXion or have more questions regarding the difference between SEO and SEM? Start a Chat below or give us a call at 866-888-5948 today!