You might have heard the terms SEM and PPC while discussing digital marketing services. Both of these terms are used interchangeably. These two digital marketing approaches may be similar in the result that they bring but they are both completely different from each other. These are two strategies that work towards boosting your online presence by engaging traffic to your website with objectives of lead generation, conversion and brand awareness.

The only common thing all business marketing aims for is to gain traffic and boost sales. Therefore paid advertisements play a crucial role for small businesses, start-ups, as well as for big enterprises. Terms like SEO, SEM and PPC are used widely and creates confusion among the new companies and marketers emerging. Let's just check out as many aspects as we can of both of them to understand the difference between SEM and PPC better and also decide which one is better.

SEM is an abbreviated term for Search Engine Marketing. SEM in digital marketing is more like a process in which you create paid advertising campaigns that are to appear in the Search Engine Result Pages. Advertisers pay by bidding to target keywords based on their potential customer search terms. SEM is basically used for promoting products and services as and when users search for them. These ads appear on different positions of a SERP (top or bottom) depending on their bidding while setting up the ad campaign. These paid listings are relevant to your interest or search, making it like that you will surely click on them. 

PPC is an abbreviated form of Pay Per Click. It is one of the models of paid search advertisement for which an advertiser pay a cost each time their ad is clicked. To be clear, it comes under SEM which buys visits to your website avoiding the long wait for the organic visit from the long process of SEO. This is all you need to know about SEM and PPC. Now read below to know which one among them should you choose.

PPC is easy, simple and best way to get your business ad to the top of the search engine results whereas SEM uses both organic and paid marketing which ensure long lasting results once they are achieved. If you're looking for customer retention and brabd stability SEM is preferable to PPC. PPC can be best for e-commerce as well as big brands or product launching. Now depending upon what you need you must decide which one you'd go for. If you're having a confusion what you can do is consult with digital marketing companies that provide digital marketing services and achieve your business goals and achievements.