Search engine marketing (SEM, aka search marketing) is a type of digital marketing that utilizes search engines like Google to get more traffic to a website. There are two ways to do SEM. You can pay for ads to show up in the search engine’s paid results or optimize your pages to show up in organic results. And you can do both too.

Generally speaking, search engine marketing consists of using different tools and strategies to optimize your search engine advertising. The goal is to appear at the top of search results, attract more clicks to your website, and ultimately increase conversations.

Search engine marketing describes a range of tools you can use to drive traffic to your brand’s website by working with search engines. SEM isn’t just about search engine optimization (SEO). While SEO is about improving the visibility of your website on search engine results pages, SEM is primarily about improving the visibility of online ads.