Search engine optimization (SEO) is adjusting your website to improve your natural ranking in search results. You cannot pay to improve your website ranking on Bing or Yahoo, thus we often refer to these results as unpaid or “organic” search results. Clicks from SEO are free. But SEO also requires technical expertise and involves some factors over which you have only limited control. Search engine marketing (SEM) is paid advertising that appears next to or above unpaid (or “organic”) search results. These paid ads are purchased through Microsoft Advertising. You pay for SEM clicks. But SEM gives you more control over when your website appears on results pages and you decide how much you want to pay. And you can measure which ads are working and quickly improve your results. You don’t have to choose between SEO and SEM. You can do both!