Search engine marketing acronyms: what are they talking about?

That Americans like acronyms is not really a surprise to those who have worked for an American company. Acronyms are extremely useful as a conversational shorthand especially when working with unwieldy terms like search engine optimization. SEO is just so much easier to roll off the tongue. The problem with acronyms is that it is very easy to lose the original meaning – a significant communication problem. In the world of search marketing, SEM is a good case in point.

The following search-marketing glossary highlights common acronyms often used by the search marketing community.

SEO

Search Engine Optimization. Indicates the activities undertaken to generate traffic, usually qualified, to a website through the “natural” results in a search engine. In Google, ~80% of user clicks are on the natural (also called organic) results.

PPC

Pay per click. Refers to the sponsored advertisements which appear in search engine results. The advertiser pays when a user clicks on an ad to visit the site described in the ad. In Google, ~20% of clicks are on sponsored results, known as AdWords.

SEM

Search Engine Marketing. Encompasses all of the activities undertaken to promote something, such as a product or service, through search engines. Generally this means SEO, PPC or combination of the two. There are also ways to market through search engines without having a website; but, in this day and age, it is not clear whether this makes much sense. A very common mistake is to refer to “SEO and SEM” where SEM is used improperly to refer to PPC. It is somewhat akin to the misuse of “hit” in web analytics to mean visitors or page views.

SERP

Search Engine Results Page (or Position). Refers to the search results for a certain keyword phrase and, in particular, how the keyword phrase ranks in the search results. Today there is a greater tendency to monitor the traffic from organic search in Google, Yahoo! & Co. and the resultant conversion rather than focusing on search engine ranking results.. The reasons are varied – but a primary consideration is that the mere presence in search results doesn’t tell us much about whether users will click on a result and, after arriving at our site, complete an activity aligned with our site’s goals, i.e. conversion.

SEP

Search Engine Positioning. An older, now obsolete, way to indicate SEO.

The above glossary should clarify common misunderstandings of search engine marketing acronyms.

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