An umbrella term for increasing a website’s visibility in search engine results pages, encompassing both paid and organic activities. Search Engine Marketing encompasses SEO: Earning traffic through unpaid or free listings and SEM: Buying traffic through paid search listings. Search Marketing, a shortened way of saying Search Engine Marketing, is now often used as the umbrella term over SEO and SEM. The longer phrase “search engine marketing”—or SEM—is now typically used to describe paid search activities.
Inbound search engine marketing allows you to pull in customers by creating content, optimizing that content for search engines, and promoting and sharing that content in social media; and is a more efficient and cost-effective marketing strategy. Keyword research will help you understand how your online competition is using keywords, and will help you devise a strategy for choosing keywords that match your business well.