SEM, SEA, SEO, CPC, what “the hell” does that mean?
SEM – Search engine marketing
Combination of SEA and SEO, branch of online marketing
SEA – Search engine advertising
Posting ads on search results pages or other websites
Visible to user
- CPC (cost per click): the advertiser specifies how much they are willing to pay per click.
- CPA (cost per acquisition): The advertiser specifies how much they are willing to pay per conversion achieved through the advertising measures.
- CPM (cost per thousand): The advertiser specifies how much they are willing to pay per 1,000 impressions of advertisements.
- Cost per call: Here, certain advertisement portals offer the possibility to specify how much an advertiser is willing to pay per visit.
- Cost per lead: Depending on the web portal, costs for leads such as subscribing to a newsletter or downloading a PDF can also be agreed upon.
SEO – Search engine optimization
Includes measures to optimize websites for crawling and indexing by search engines using on-page and off-page optimization.
SEO is often long-term
Rather “invisible” for the user
SERP – Search Engine Result Pages
In the SERPs of search engines, the search results of a search query are listed. They results are organized by relevance in descending order.
SERPs show the results of searches for a keyword or phrase combination in the form of snippets.
What influences the order of the results?
- Registered users: if a search engine user is registered with their account, the search results will be adapted according to previous user behavior, provided that this is permitted in their data protection settings.
- Browser history: if a user does not empty the Cache of the browser, the search engine obtains information regarding previous search queries with cookies, and adapts the results accordingly.
- Location: if the geo-localisation is activated, the search engine aligns the SERPs to the location of the user.
- Device: If a user searches via a mobile device, the search results will look different, as search engines favors for example mobile optimized websites in the SERPs.
