I am at a cocktail party and Sally asks the inevitable question, “What do you do?”   I cringe because most likely, she will say the two words that I hate most when it comes to descriptions about what I do.  So I say to my imbibing interviewer, I am a Director of Search Engine Marketing.  Sally offers back, “Oh yeah, I know, Search Engine Marketing is made up of two areas, PPC and SEO, isn’t it?”  So my usual dilemma presents itself yet again: Do I launch into an educational rant explaining what I feel are the proper names for the two components of SEM, or drop it?  Slurry Sally seems interested, so I launch.

“Sally, I think you have the gist of what I do in that there are two main areas, but they are called Paid & Organic SEM.  Please let me explain.  On the Paid side of things, we are talking about ‘Paid Search Engine Marketing’ or marketing to the ‘Paid’ or ‘Sponsored’ listings.   When you do a search from, say your laptop or mobile device, using Google, Yahoo, MSN, or even Facebook, the paid or sponsored listings are usually located at the top and to the right of the Organic listings.  A marketer can expect to market to roughly 20-30% of the search engine results when they employ Paid SEM.  When you said PPC, or pay per click, this is a type of ad that is utilized in Paid Search Engine Marketing.  Paid Inclusion is another.”

Sally’s eyes haven’t glazed over yet, so I continue.

“As for Organic SEM, what you called SEO, this involves marketing to the Organic search results of the major search engines.  Organic results form the body of the search results page on the left-hand side of the engines.  SEO, as you mentioned, stands for Search Engine Optimizing.  This is one of the tactics used in Organic SEM.  Sometimes the SEO tactic is called On-Page or On-Site Optimization.  This is where you focus on optimizing the pages of a site so that search engine spiders can easily crawl through your site, know what your pages are about, and serve it up in the Organic search results.  Another tactic employed in Organic SEM is Off-Page or Off-Site Optimization. This is where you improve the authority of a web site by utilizing different ways of garnering links from other web sites to your own site.  The search engines look at links as if they are votes for your site; the more high quality links you have, the more votes your site has and generally speaking, the higher up in the index your page will appear in the Organic listings in the engines.”

Sally gives me a satisfying “oh, I get it” and I feel that my job here is done, other than to finish my delicious glass of red wine, a tasty Beringer Founders’ Estate.

In my opinion, when we encounter the ‘Slurry Sally’s’, clients, or colleagues who use terms like SEO and PPC, we should be correcting them.  In the case of PPC, they are calling a whole branch of Search Engine Marketing by one of the ad types used.  When they call Organic SEM, SEO, they are calling the other main branch of SEM by one of the tactics employed.  To me, this seems to be downright inaccurate.  Besides the terms Paid & Organic SEM being more accurate in terms of the activities that we undertake for our clients, they also carry an air of legitimacy and sophistication that befits the fantastic things we do for our clients in these branches of marketing.

I put out a call to SEM’ers everywhere; please help me to clean up the nomenclature of our profession so that we can move forward with our clients, with an accurate portrayal of what we do.  Let’s help ourselves bring clarity and legitimacy to our exciting, new and growing profession called SEM, before the poorly named parts become our entrenched monikers.