If you are a local business owner and want to know a few benefits of choosing a SEO company over an SEM one please keep reading.
SEO, Search Engine Marketing, is geared toward local, small to medium sized businesses, is more targeted on a website Quality Score as a whole, and much lower in cost to maintain. You should always have an optimized Google Places/Plus profile to match your business address and phone on your website. The mixture of the two, WordPress and Google Places, with off page SEO is what not only the SERPS are looking for, but also your local users.
SEM, Search Engine Marketing, is Sponsored Link placement and is targeted towards national companies, national products and services, and is a much more broader range in cost. You are allowed less targeted campaigns, as the whole process is run through Google AdWords. You say “go” and it goes, and so does your budget.
There are benefits to both products. I just want to make sure you know the difference before wasting time and money. If you were, for example, an attorney in San Jose, CA that had a new practice. It would take you months, if not longer, to SEO a website and Google Places to get to the first page of the SERPS. For a short period of time I would suggest running an SEM campaign to get new leads, or give video marketing a try. We can have a video on the first page of Google in about two weeks.